I 


jmm|!MEKgfliaEi; 


The 

UNTRIED  DOOR 


RICHARD  ROBERTS 


[mm^-A 


'C^ 


BS  2415  .R6  1921a 

Roberts,  Richard,  1874-1945 

The  untried  door 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


Hastf«H 


THE 

UNTRIED    DOOR 

An  Attempt  to  Discover  the  Mind 
OF  Jesus  for  To-day 

BY  / 

RICHARD  llOBERTS        ^ 


*/  am  the  door;  by  me  if  any  man  enter  in,  he  shall  be 
saved,  and  shall  go  in  and  go  out,  and  shall  find  pasture." 


NEW  YORK 

THE  WOMANS   PRESS 
1921 


Copyright,  1921,  by 

Thb  National  Board  of  the  Yoxtng  Womens  Christian  Associations 

or  the  United  States  of  America 

New  York 


Press  of 

J.  J.  Little  &  Ives  Co. 

New  York 


THIS  BOOK  IS  INSCRIBED 

(as  it  should  be) 

TO 

A.    C.    R. 

WHOSE   SHAEE   IN  WHATEVER 

GOOD    IT    CONTAINS     IS 

THE   BETTER  HALF 


PREFACE 

rriHIS  hook  is  meant  to  he  of  the  nature  of  a 
m  challenge.  We  are  heing  told  hy  many  voices 
that  the  only  hope  of  the  world  lies  in  following 
Jesus.  But  we  are  not  told  with  any  explicitness  what 
"following  Jesus''  means.  Here  an  endeavor  is  made 
to  discover  the  mind  of  Jesus  and  to  see  how  far  it 
shows  us  a  way  out  of  the  intolerahle  confusion  into 
which  life  has  fallen. 

The  hook  does  not  pretend  to  cover  all  the  ground 
except  in  hroad  outline;  least  of  all  does  it  pretend 
to  he  a  theological  interpretation  of  Jesus  and  his 
work  in  the  world.  Its  purpose  is  a  much  simpler  one. 
It  tries  to  ask  what  Jesus  actually  thought  and  whether 
his  thought  has  real  applicahility  to  the  life  of  to-day. 
Had  he  a  coherent  and  self -consistent  philosophy  of 
life;  and  if  so  can  we  translate  it  into  life?  It  serves 
no  purpose  to  call  him  Lord,  if  we  do  not  or  cannot 
do  the  things  he  com^manded. 

An  inquiry  of  this  kind  has  little  value  except  it  he 
frank  and  unafraid.  The  writer  has  tried  to  read  the 
Gospels  ''with  unveiled  face"  and  has  tried  to  speak 
the  truth  as  he  has  seen  it.  It  is  probable  that  the 
positions  he  has  reached  may  seem  to  some  unduly 
timid  and  to  others  undidy  radical.    But  we  shall  iind 

vii 


PREFACE 

the  truth  only  by  bringing  what  we  see  to  the  test  of 
discussion.  The  Womans  Press  has  been  moved  to 
publish  it  by  its  conviction  that  it  owes  it  to  the  king- 
dom of  God  and  to  the  future  to  give  currency  to  a  pre- 
sumably honest  interpretation  of  the  mind  of  Jesus  in 
the  hope  that  it  may  provoke  discussion  and  that  in 
a  fellowship  of  thought  we  may  discover  the  truth  that 
shall  make  us  free. 

It  will  be  observed  that  in  the  following  pages  little 
appeal  is  made  to  the  Fourth  Gospel.  The  writer  be- 
lieves that  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  historical  accuracy  has 
been  subordhmted  to  the  expository  intention  of  its 
author.  It  is  an  interpretation  rather  than  a  chronicle. 
It  is  not  for  this  less  valuable  a  part  of  the  Christian 
inheritance;  for  it  is  as  needfid  for  our  understanding 
of  the  Gospel  that  we  shoidd  have  interpretation  as 
it  is  that  we  should  have  history.  The  Synoptic  Gospels 
the  writer  regards  as  giving  us  adequate  and  trust- 
worthy material  for  a  true  estimate  of  the  life  and 
mind  of  Jesus.  They  are  no  doubt  colored  to  some 
extent  by  the  influences  and  tendencies  of  the  time  at 
which  they  were  written;  and  a  comparative  study  re- 
veals the  introduction  into  the  text  of  a  certain  amount 
of  material  which  seems  not  to  be  consistent  with  the 
general  drift  of  the  story.  The  writer  has  endeavored 
to  exercise  his  best  judgment  in  these  matters;  and 
if  at  any  point  he  has  felt  uncertainty,  he  has  frankly 
admitted  it. 

The  substance  of  Chapters  III,  IV,  V  {first  part) 
viii 


PREFACE 

and  VI  constituted  the  material  of  a  course  of  lectures 
given  on  the  Earl  Foundation,  in  connection  with  the 
Pacific  School  of  Religion,  at  Berkeley,  California,  in 

November  ip20. 

RICHARD  ROBERTS 

Postscript. — In  reading  over  the  proofs  of  this 
volume,  it  has  appeared  to  me  that  the  material  might 
have  been  arranged  somewhat  differently  with  perhaps 
a  little  gain  in  coherency  of  treatment.  In  this  re- 
arrangement, the  first  part  of  Chapter  V  would  im^ 
mediately  follow  Chapter  II,  closing  with  a  sharper 
definition  of  Jesus'  principle  of  criticism.  This  prin- 
ciple, as  I  see  it,  is  two-fold.  It  asks  concerning  an 
institution,  a  doctrine,  or  a  course  of  conduct  two 
questions:  Does  it  make  for  the  increase  of  life? 
Does  it  make  for  the  unity  of  life?  Then  with  very 
slight  change.  Chapter  III  could  be  taken  as  expound- 
ing the  application  of  the  first  part  of  this  criterion; 
and  Chapter  IV  as  expounding  the  second  part. 


IX 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Preface vii 

By  Way  of  Prologue:  "He  could  not  he  hid."        i 

CHAPTER 

I.    The  World  as  Jesus  Saw  It 8 

Top-dogs  and  Under-dogs — Roman  and  Jew 
—The  Source  of  the  Trouble— The  Moral 
Revolution — The  Rule  of  God — The  Jew 
and  the  World. 

II.    The  Roots  of  the  New  Life 24 

The  Quickening  of  Hope — The  Nature  of 
the  New  Life — Jesus'  Attitude  to  the 
World— The  Curse  of  Externality— The 
Child-mind  —  Prayer  —  Meditation  —  The 
Mountain  Top  and  the  Valley. 

III.  Life  and  Things 42 

Life  and  Things — The  Principle  of  Inward- 
ness— Work  and  Business — Humanism — 
Property — The  State — Politics  —  Legalism 
—  Dogma  — The  World  Re-valued  —  The 
Holy  Family. 

IV.  Right    and    Wrong     . 82 

The  Moral  Order — Offences  and  Forgiveness 
— Love  and  Holiness — The  Popular  Idea 
of  Justice — Jesus'  Doctrine  of  Right — The 
Art  of  Fellowship — The  Nemesis  of  Pride 
— The  New  Sense  of  Collective  Responsi- 

xi 


CONTENTS 

JAPTER  PAGE 

bility — The  Law  of  the  Moral  Average — 
"Judge  Not" — Figs  and  Thistles — Nations 
and  Classes — The  Ultimate  Society. 

V.     Yesterday  and  To-morrow 120 

"Ancient  Good" — Radicals,  Liberals,  Con- 
servatives—  The  Attitude  of  Jesus  —  The 
Meaning  of  History — Jesus'  Appeal  to 
History — The  Great  Omission — "The  End 
of  the  Age" — The  Apocalyptic  Hope — Its 
Final  Meaning — Progress. 

VL    The  Son  of  Man 141 

Jesus'  Self-knowledge  —  Propaganda  —  Per- 
sonal Contacts — Public  Work — The  First 
Crisis — The  Galilean  Ministry  and  Its 
Abandonment — The  Birth  of  the  New  So- 
ciety— Carrying  the  Challenge  to  Jerusalem 
— The  Cross  and  the  Moral  Tragedy  of  the 
World — The  Everlasting  Mercy. 

By  Way  of  Epilogue:  The  Wingless  Victory     165 


Xlt 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

BY  WAY  OF  PROLOGUE 
"He  could  not  he  hid.'' 

7i  "YO  US  avons  cJmsse  ce  J esus-Ch/rist ,  said  a  French 
/  V  politician  in  the  days — not  so  long  ago — when  the 
French  Senate  was  disestablishing  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  in  France,  doing  the  right  thing  for  the 
wrong  reason.  "We  have  driven  out  this  Jesus  Christ," 
said  he,  as  others  had  said  much  the  same  thing  often 
before.  But  it  never  happens;  or  if  it  does,  it  is  never 
for  long.  If  you  drive  him  away  from  this  place  to- 
day, you  are  apt  to  hear  about  him  in  some  other  place 
tomorrow.  Round  about  the  time  when  the  French 
politicians  were — or  supposed  they  were — exiling  him 
from  France,  the  British  and  Foreign  Bible  Society  re- 
ported, I  remember,  that  the  Gospel  of  Mark  had  been 
translated  into  the  Chinook  jargon.  You  may  suppress 
him,  crucify  him,  bury  him  in  your  Jerusalem,  but  you 
will  hear  of  him  by  and  by  in  some  distant  Galilee  where 
there  are  eager  minds  and  simple  hearts  ready  to  receive 
him.  "He  could  not  be  hid.'*  The  other  day  I  read  in 
a  periodical  a  passage  quoted  from  a  letter  written  by 
Mr,  Bernard  Shaw  to  another  writer :    "How  do  you  ex- 

I 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

plain  that  you  and  George  Moore  and  I  are  now  occu- 
pying ourselves  with  Jesus?"  And  Mr.  Shaw  has  told 
us  (in  the  preface  to  "Androcles  and  the  Lion")  that 
he  sees  no  way  out  of  the  world's  misery  except  "that 
which  would  have  been  found  by  Christ's  will  if  he  had 
undertaken  the  work  of  a  modern  practical  statesman." 
Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  has  told  us  that  if  men  had  the 
courage  to  live  the  life  that  is  written  of  in  the  Gospels, 
the  world  of  our  dreams  would  come  of  itself,  and  we 
should  not  need  to  trouble  ourselves  about  political  and 
economic  changes.  There  are  others  who  are  saying  the 
same  thing.  Did  not  the  Prime  Ministers  of  the  Brit- 
ish Empire  write  a  letter  the  other  day  to  the  people  of 
the  Empire  saying  that  the  peace  and  happiness  of  man- 
kind depends  upon  a  deep  and  sincere  Christian  prac- 
tice? It  looks  indeed  as  though  Jesus  were  coming 
back. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  about  the  revived  interest  in 
him,  though  it  is  by  no  means  sure  that  those  who  have, 
as  it  were,  newly  discovered  him  understand  what  it  is 
they  have  discovered.  Some  for  instance  appear  to  sup- 
pose that  the  Gospels  are  the  source  of  the  conventions 
of  Anglo-American  middle-class  piety  and  that  these  to- 
gether with  a  little  mild  encouragement  to  goodwill  and 
mutual  service  constitute  the  spirit  of  Jesus.  But 
whether  Jesus  is  understood  or  not,  it  is  certain  that  he 
is  more  and  more  talked  about.  His  name  crops  up  in 
all  sorts  of  unexpected  places.  Statesmen  have  taken 
to  alluding  to  him;  journalists  quote  him;  politicians  re- 
fer to  him.  That  means  something,  surely.  And  does 
it  not  mean  that  the  old  way  of  running  the  world  has 

2 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

proved  itself  bankrupt,  that  the  professionals  of  politics 
and  statecraft  have  grown  sceptical  of  the  virtue  of 
their  machinery?  And  well,  indeed,  they  might.  Mark 
Twain  once  said  that  he  would  like  to  meet  the  devil, 
for,  said  he,  "a  person  who  has  for  untold  centuries 
maintained  his  imposing  position  of  spiritual  head  of 
four-fifths  of  the  human  race,  and  political  head  of  the 
whole  of  it  must  be  granted  the  possession  of  executive 
abilities  of  the  highest  order/'  Allow  for  the  Twain 
touch,  and  then  dispute,  if  you  can,  the  essential  truth 
of  the  saying.  Thomas  Carlyle  after  vainly  trying  to 
convince  Emerson  of  the  personality  of  the  devil,  is 
said  to  have  taken  him,  as  a  last  resort,  to  a  sitting  of 
the  British  House  of  Commons.  This  is  not  to  say  that 
there  have  not  been  great  and  good  men  concerned  in 
the  conduct  of  public  affairs  from  the  beginning  of  time; 
but  clearly  there  is  something  deeply  wrong  somewhere. 
You  need  only  look  on  the  world  as  it  is  to-day,  this  wild 
inferno  of  greed,  hunger,  passion,  fear  and  death,  this 
sorrowful  harvest  of  blood  and  fire  and  shame,  to  know 
what  manner  of  things  we  and  our  fathers  have  sown. 
And  out  of  this  grim  hole,  who  shall  dig  us?  Our 
politicians,  our  statesmen?  But  can  they  who  digged 
the  hole,  by  the  same  methods  dig  us  out  of  it?  I  trow 
not.  They  are  far  more  likely  to  bury  us  deeper  in  it, 
as  they  are  doing  to-day.  And  what  is  more,  they  are 
beginning  to  see  it.  They  know  in  their  hearts  that  the 
old  game  of  power  is  up  and  that  the  world  must  find 
some  other  way.  That  is  why  some  of  them  are  turning 
preacher. 

Perhaps  (God  send  it!)  this  new  interest  in  Jesus  is 

3 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  shadow  cast  by  the  coming  event.  Can  it  mean 
that  he  is  coming  back?  But  if  he  come,  he  will  come 
not  as  a  super-politician  to  rule  us  with  a  rod  of  iron, 
to  discipline  us  to  our  senses,  but  to  our  hearts  and  lives 
to  win  us  back  to  simplicity  and  lowliness,  to  help  us 
build  our  house  of  life  with  stones  of  love  and  truth 
and  beauty.  The  old  policies  are  working  themselves 
out  in  this  chaotic  and  heaving  aftermath  of  war;  the 
old  order  passeth  before  our  eyes.  The  confused  noises 
of  to-day  are  its  death-rattle ;  revolutions,  strikes,  famine, 
disease, — these  things  are  the  death-sweat  upon  its  face. 
The  old  order  is  dying  in  this  night  of  delirium  and 
despair.  And  then  .  .  .  ?  O  God,  what  then?  Must 
it  be  the  old,  old  story  of  building  on  rotten  foundations, 
of  labor  laden  with  fated  mortality,  the  same  old  round 
on  a  larger  scale  sowing  a  still  vaster  harvest  of  death? 
Must  it  be  so?  Or  is  there  another  way?  We  are  at 
last  beginning  to  see  it  dimly,  afar  oif.  It  is  slowly 
dawning  on  us,  but  ah!  so  slowly,  that  it  might  be  well 
to  try  the  way  of  Jesus. 


I  once  heard  a  friend  tell  this  reminiscence  of  his 
boyhood.  He  lived  in  a  quiet  village  on  a  river-side, 
half  girdled  with  hills,  far  from  the  madding  crowd. 
But  once  a  year  a  fair  was  held  in  the  village ;  and  early 
in  the  day  the  horses  and  cattle  and  sheep  were  driven 
in  from  the  surrounding  country-side.  And  with  them, 
came  pedlars  and  hucksters  with  strange  wares,  gipsies 
and   tinkers,    horse-dealers   and   cheap  jacks — a   motley, 

4 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

noisy  crew.  And  along  came  the  showmen  with  their 
circuses,  their  Aimt  Sallies  and  their  merry-go-rounds. 
While  the  day  was  yet  young,  the  quiet  old-world  vil- 
lage had  been  turned  into  a  drunken,  roaring  hell.  The 
narrow,  cobbled  streets  were  strewn  with  the  untidy, 
filthy  litter  that  a  fair  always  brings  with  it,  and  the 
beauty  was  turned  into  ashes.  But  as  the  day  wore  on 
to  evening,  the  trafficking  and  the  bargaining  drew  to 
an  end,  and  the  invaders  began  to  pack  up  their  traps 
and  leave.  The  showmen  pulled  down  their  tents,  and 
the  pedlars  put  up  their  wares  and  began  to  drift  away. 
The  noise  slowly  died  down;  the  village  emptied  itself 
of  the  unaccustomed  riffraff  that  had  invaded  it.  By 
sundown,  the  whole  mob  was  going  or  gone, — and  the 
villagers  stood  in  their  street  and  watched  them  go, 
one  after  another  .  .  .  until  the  last  caravan  of  the  last 
showman  dropped  out  of  sight  over  the  bend  of  the  hill; 
and  the  village  returned  to  its  own  peace. 

So,  said  my  friend,  the  true  world  of  life  has  been 
invaded  by  a  show,  a  Vanity  Fair  that  has  turned  its 
peace  into  tumult,  its  beauty  into  squalor,  its  joy  into 
pain.  A  false  and  illusory  doctrine  has  imposed  itself 
on  the  truth  of  life,  and  we  are  living  in  a  world  of  un- 
reality and  mistaking  it  for  the  real.  There  is  the  peep- 
show  of  politics,  with  its  armies  of  little  men,  ignorant, 
thoughtless,  dull,  making  tremendous  gestures  and  play- 
ing with  issues  of  life  and  death ;  there  is  the  great  show 
of  statecraft,  with  "Big  Fours"  or  "Big  Fives"  sitting 
around  a  green  table  prescribing  the  destinies  of  nations, 
to  suit  their  formulae  or  their  fears;  the  tragic  show  of 

5 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

war,  with  its  madness  and  bloodlust  and  hate  and  its 
strange  splendid  heroisms, — and  its  still  more  tragic 
aftermath, — 

The  many  men,  so  beautiful ! 

And  they  all  dead  did  He: 

And  a  thousand  thousand  slimy  things 

Lived  on;  and  so  did  I 

and  you  and  all  of  us  who  were  not  worthy  of  so  great 
devotion;  the  godless  show  of  empire  with  its  tawdry 
trappings  and  pomps  and  boastings,  with  its  oppressions 
and  tyrannies  and  its  contempt  of  subject  peoples;  the 
ghastly  show  of  commercialised  pleasure  with  its  har- 
lotry, its  drinking-hells,  its  gambling-dens  and  its  cor- 
ruption of  art ;  the  frenzied  show  of  money-getting  with 
its  thousand  perversions  of  mind  and  heart,  the  mutual 
exploitation,  the  scalp-hunting,  the  striking,  the  heresy- 
hunting  ...  oh,  but  what  a  mad,  mad  world  it  is! 

But  this  carnival  of  all  the  follies  will  work  itself 
out,  exhausting  itself  by  its  own  excess;  and  the  dance 
of  death  will  begin  to  pall  and  lose  its  zest.  The  tumult 
will  die  away,  and  the  showmen  will  find  that  the  hour 
has  come  to  pack  up  their  traps  and  go.  .  .  .  One  by 
one  they  will  vanish  from  the  landscape ;  and  not  we,  but 
perhaps  our  children's  children  will  see  the  last  caravan 
of  the  last  showman  disappear  in  the  distance  over  the 
bend  of  the  hill  .  .  .  and  life  will  be  left  to  its  appointed 
peace.  And  there  will  be  left  with  us  perchance  an 
Isaiah  to  speak  to  us  of  God,  and  a  Francis  to  teach  us 
simplicity  and  purity  of  heart,  and  a  Lincoln  to  keep 
us  in  the  ways  of  sanity, — yes,  and  when  the  pall  of 

6 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

illusion  is  wholly  lifted,  JESUS,  where   (had  we  but 
known  it)  he  has  always  been,  standing  in  the  midst. 


But  though  it  be  a  far  cry  to  this  last  act  in  the  drama 
of  the  world,  it  need  be  no  far  cry  to  its  last  act  in 
your  spirit.  The  shadow  of  the  City  of  Destruction 
with  its  carnival  of  tragic  folly  is  upon  our  souls:  the 
passing  show  with  its  "magic  shadow-shapes  that  come 
and  go,"  Vanity  Fair  with  its  mad,  bad,  sad  illusions, — 
well,  but  we  may  quit  them  whensoever  we  will.  We 
may  bid  the  tumult  and  the  shouting  die;  we  may  bid 
the  showmen  2.nd  the  cheap] acks  pack  up  their  wares 
and  go  their  way.  And  at  our  bidding  they  will  go,  one 
after  another  .  .  .  until  the  last  wagon  of  the  show  van- 
ishes in  the  cool  of  the  evening  over  the  crest  of  the  hill. 
Then  you  open  your  eyes  and  find  yourself  in  Galilee, 
that  country  of  the  mind  whither  the  Lord  of  Life  has 
gone  before  you  and  is  waiting  for  you,  to  give  you  life 
and  health  and  peace.  And  you  will  know  that  all  the 
rest  is  illusion  and  delirium,  that  to  be  with  Jesus  in 
Galilee  is  alone  reality  and  life.  When  you  have  turned 
your  back  on  the  City  of  Death,  when  its  vain  dreams 
are  gone  up  in  smoke,  its  noisy  pretensions  and  its  hollow 
little  triumphs  but  a  stack  of  pitiful  dust,  then  life  in 
all  its  splendor  and  wonder  dawns  and  calls  you — with 
Jesus  the  glory  in  the  midst  of  it. 

And  this  is,  I  think,  the  beginning  of  what  Jesus 
meant  by  the  Kingdom  of  God. 


CHAPTER  ONE 

THE   WORLD    AS    JESUS    SAW    IT 

(Mt  9*35-36;  10:5-7;  Mk.  4:12-17;  Lk.  4:42-44)* 


'When  he  beheld  the  multitudes,  he  was  moved  with 
compassion  for  them,  because  they  were  distressed 
and  scattered  as  sheep  having  no  shepherd." 

''And  other  sheep  I  have,  which  are  not  of  this 
fold;  them  also  I  must  bring,  and  they  shall  hear  my 
voice." 

THE  outward  conditions  of  life  in  the  society  into 
which  Jesus  was  born  have  been  so  often  de- 
scribed that  we  do  not  need  to  rehearse  them 
in  detail  here.  At  bottom,  however,  the  life  of  Pales- 
tine, as  Jesus  saw  it,  was  not  essentially  different  from 
the  common  life  of  human  society  in  every  age  and 
in  every  land.  It  was  not  an  industrial  society  as  we 
understand  the  term.    It  was  not  vexed  with  what  we 

*A  reading  of  the  passages  indicated  at  the  beginning  of 
each  chapter  will  furnish  the  Scriptural  background  of  the  en- 
suing discussion. 

8 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

call  capitalism.  But  it  was  a  competitive  society;  and 
the  competitive  system  had  wrought  in  it  its  character- 
istic result. 

To  state  it  very  summarily,  this  result  is  the  divi- 
sion of  society  into  two  broad  classes.  Disraeli  once 
spoke  of  the  "two  nations"  that  inhabited  England, — 
the  ruling  classes  and  the  rest.  But  every  known  so- 
ciety has  had  its  ''two  nations."  "The  poor,"  said 
Mt. 26:11  Jesus,  "yc  have  always  with  you";  and 
with  the  poor,  their  masters.  In  human  society,  you 
always  have  the  top-dog  and  the  under-dog.  On  one 
hand,  tyrannies,  feudalisms,  oligarchies,  plutocracies; 
on  the  other,  chattel  slavery,  serfdom,  villenage, 
"wagery," — this  schism  has  been  the  ancient  curse  of 
our  race. 

In  Palestine,  there  was  a  double  cleavage.  Neither 
was  economic  as  the  great  modern  cleavage  is,  though 
both  had  definite  economic  consequences.  For  both 
made  heavy  inroads  upon  the  none  too  abundant  re- 
sources of  the  peasantry.  The  first  cleavage  was  asso- 
ciated with  religion.  There  a  privileged  class  lorded 
it  over  the  souls  of  men,  caring  little  for  the  common 
folk  save  only  as  they  provided  a  pedestal  for  their 
own  eminence  and  a  source  of  income  for  the  temple 
and  its  officers.  But  this  particular  cleavage  was  a 
purely  domestic  affair;  and  the  burden  that  it  imposed 
provoked  no  such  resentment  as  did  the  foreign  political 
yoke  which  the  people  were  compelled  to  bear.  The 
Jews  were  a  subject  people;  and  being  a  proud  people, 

9 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

with  a  long  and  notable  history,  they  hated  their 
Roman  masters  with  an  unrelenting  bitterness.*  And 
to  bitterness  was  added  despair ;  for  the  Roman  power 
seemed  unassailable.  Again  and  again  the  Jews  had 
tried  to  throw  off  this  alien  yoke,  but  always  with  the 
same  disastrous  result.  The  yoke  was  fastened  on 
more  firmly  than  ever.  Their  own  great  men,  who  in 
their  hearts  desired  to  see  the  overthrow  of  the  Roman 
power,  yet  cared  too  much  for  their  own  security  and 
position  to  take  any  of  the  risks  involved  in  the  task 
of  emancipation. t  No  wonder  the  multitudes  seemed 
to  Jesus  to  be  leaderless  and  disorganised.  And  in  this 
tragedy,  he  found  the  problem  of  his  life. 


"He  asked  them,  What  were  ye  reasoning  in  the 
way?  But  they  held  their  peace:  for  they  had  dis- 
puted with  one  another  in  the  way,  who  was  the  great- 


Just  as  it  appears  to  many  people  to-day  that  the  only 
remedy  for  our  social  confusion  is  the  speedy  destruc- 

*  Historically,  it  would  appear  that  the  Jews  had  less  to  com- 
plain of  their  imperial  masters  than  some  other  subject  nations 
have  had.  By  and  large,  the  Roman  was  a  tolerant  ruler ;  and 
he  was,  as  a  rule,  unusually  tolerant  in  his  dealings  with  the 
Jews.  But  this  did  not  alter  the -fact  that  he  was  an  alien  in- 
vader ;  and  the  misbehaviour  of  some  of  his  agents — political 
and  fiscal — did  not  help  to  reconcile  the  Jew  to  his  dominion. 

t  The  Herods,  however,  consistently  maintained  a  family 
tradition   of   apparently  genuine   loyalty  to  the   Empire. 

10 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tion  of  the  capitalist  system,  so  it  seemed  to  many  in 
Jesus'  day  that  the  plain  way  out  of  the  national  dis- 
tress was  the  swift  and  violent  overthrow  of  the  Roman 
power.  Now  and  again,  some  patriotic  soul  would 
raise  the  standard  of  revolt  in  the  hill-country,  and 
many  would  rally  to  it  in  the  desperate  hope  of  driving 
the  oppressive  foreigner  out  of  the  land.  But  there 
was  a  strategic  reason  why  the  Romans  would  not 
countenance  an  independent  Palestine,  and  they  sup- 
pressed these  risings  with  vigour  and  dispatch.*  Jesus 
from  the  first  seems  to  have  perceived  the  futility  of 
the  policy  of  his  fellow-countrymen,  and  he  saw  that 
the  real  trouble  was  too  deep-seated  to  be  disposed  of 
merely  by  substituting  one  political  system  for  an- 
other. When  he  traced  the  trouble  to  its  roots,  he  saw 
that  it  was  a  distemper  from  which  the  Jew  suffered 
no  less  than  the  Roman.  So  inveterate  was  this  dis- 
order that  it  was  continually  putting  out  its  head  even 
among  Jesus'  closest  friends.  It  was  the  source  of 
the  Pharisees'  pride ;  it  was  the  foundation  upon  which 
the  imperial  pride  of  Rome  was  reared.     This  radical 

*  It  might  not  be  amiss  to  cite  a  modern  parallel  by  way  of 
illustration.  It  is  a  "strategic"  reason  that  stands  in  the  way 
of  British  recognition  of  Irish  independence.  The  Jews  had 
also  their  Sinn  Fein  party — the  Zealots — though  it  is  prob- 
able that  they  were  not  known  by  that  name  in  the  lifetime 
of  Jesus.  The  description  of  Simon  in  the  Gospels  as  "the 
Zealot"  was  probably  due  to  his  association  with  some  party 
that  had  affinities  with  and  may  have  been  a  precursor  of  the 
Zealots  who  according  to  Josephus  were  not  known  by  that 
name  before  66  A.  D.  On  the  Zealots  see  Foakes  Jackson  and 
Kirsopp  Lake,  "The  Beginnings  of  Christianity,"  Vol.  i.  Ap- 
pendix I,  p.  421. 

II 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

disorder  was  that  self-love  which  was  a  denial  of  the 
law  that  bade  men  love  God  and  their  neighbours. 
The  impulse  of  self-love  sets  the  strong  man  on  the 
throne  and  the  weak  man  under  his  feet.  Not  that 
the  weak  man  has  any  less  self-love,  but  having  less 
capacity,  in  the  scramble  for  the  prizes  of  self-love, 
he  goes  under  and  the  strong  man  rides  him. 

It  is  hard  to  say  which  of  these  two  conditions  is 
the  more  demoralising.  The  top-dog  becomes  hardened 
and  brutalised ;  the  under-dog  is  crushed  and  dehuman- 
ised. The  tyrant  grows  more  tyrannous,  the  serf  more 
servile.  The  despot  tightens  the  bands  of  coercion, 
the  helot  counters  it  with  cunning.  Power,  pride,  ar- 
rogance breed  a  moral  insensibility  hardly  curable ;  op- 
pression and  fear  lead  to  habits  of  deceit  and  the  meaner 
tactics  of  self-preservation.  It  is  a  historical  com- 
monplace that  long  continued  oppression  breaks  the 
moral  backbone  of  a  class  or  a  people;  and  the  disin- 
herited reproduce  among  themselves  the  predatory 
habits  of  the  privileged.  "One  could  not  be  deaf  or 
blind,"  says  Lord  Morley  in  his  Reminiscences,  "to 
the  obvious  fact  that  the  bitterest  complaints  on  the 
lips  of  the  Irish  tenants  were  constantly  found  not 
to  be  directed  against  the  landlord,  but  either  against 
his  father  for  dividing  the  farm,  or  his  brother  for 
marrying,  or  his  neighbour  for  bidding  against  him. 
The  efforts  of  the  League  (the  Irish  Land  League) 
have  been  as  much  directed  against  the  covetousness 
of  tenants  in  face  of  one  another  as  against  the  covet- 

12 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ousness  of  landlords  and  agents."  One  may  hear  echoes 
of  a  like  social  disintegration  in  the  Gospels. 

Lord  Morley,  in  another  place,  speaks  of  "that  hor- 
rid burden  and  impediment  upon  the  soul  which  the 
Churches  call  Sin,  and  which  by  whatever  name  you 
call  it,  is  a  real  catastrophe  in  the  moral  nature  of 
man."  The  theologian  may  call  it  sin,  but  the  name 
is  immaterial.  The  thing  itself  is  simply  and  only 
self-love.  And  from  this  our  whole  human  tragedy 
springs.  "When,"  says  the  Theologia  Germanica,  an 
invaluable  little  book  of  devotion  which  has  come  down 
to  us  from  the  Middle  Ages,  "the  creature  claimeth  for 
its  own  anything  good  such  as  Substance,  Knowledge, 
Life,  Power,  and  in  short,  everything  that  we  should 
call  good,  as  if  it  were  that  or  possessed  that  ...  as 
often  as  this  cometh  to  pass,  the  creature  goeth  astray. 
What  did  the  Devil  do  else,  or  what  was  his  going 
astray  but  that  he  claimed  for  himself  to  be  also  some- 
what and  would  have  it  that  somewhat  was  his  and 
something  was  due  to  him?  This  setting  up  of  a  claim, 
and  his  I  and  Me  and  Mine,  these  were  his  going 
astray  and  his  Fall.  And  so  it  is  to  this  day."  There 
as  simply  as  possible  is  the  central  mystery  of  sin. 
It  is  unsocial  or  anti-social  conduct ;  but  whatever  is 
anti-social  is  anti-social  toward  God  no  less  than  to- 
ward man.  Sin  is  self-assertion  as  against  both  God 
and  man.  It  is  at  once  a  wronging  of  man  and  re- 
bellion against  God. 

And  because  this  self-love  is  in  the  saddle,  it  pro- 

13 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

duces  a  world  of  strife.  "Sin  being  a  principle  of 
egoism  and  isolation,"  said  tliat  great  French  priest 
and  lover  of  freedom,  Lamennais,  "it  forces  each  to 
lose  himself  in  his  own  individuality.  The  insatiable 
Ego  breathes  in  all  that  lies  around  it ;  it  swells  itself, 
develops,  grows  steadily  and  absorbs  all  that  is  weaker 
into  it  .  .  .  and  it  can  be  stopped  in  its  progress  only 
by  another  tyrant  equal  to  it  or  superior  to  it.  There 
is  a  struggle,  bloody,  pitiless;  and  the  hideous  society 
which  is  composed  of  these  things  is  but  the  seething 
mass  of  hungry  combatants  who  come  together  only 
to  devour  one  another.  .  .  .  This  is  the  state  of  which 
sin  has  made  us  members." 

Here  is  a  social  diagnosis  which  is  true  of  all  time, 
true  of  the  time  of  Jesus  as  of  ours.  When  Newman 
looked  out  upon  the  world,  he  saw  (as  he  says  in  his 
Apologia  pro  Vita  Stia)  "a  heart-piercing,  reason-be- 
wildering spectacle."  Had  he  been  living  today,  one 
wonders  what  language  he  would  have  used  to  describe 
the  world  upon  which  we  are  looking.  The  essential 
problem  of  man  has  never  changed.  It  is  to  find  a 
remedy  for  his  self-love. 

3 

''Repent,  for  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand." 

It  cannot  be  too  clearly  understood  in  these  days 
when  so  much  talk  about  revolution  is  abroad,  and 

14 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Jesus  is  sometimes  claimed  as  a  proletarian  leader, 
that  there  is  nothing  in  his  story — whether  word  or 
deed — that  can  be  quoted  in  support  of  what  is  popu- 
larly called  revolution.  He  saw  that  even  if  the  Romans 
could  be  driven  out,  it  would  only  leave  the  petty 
princes,  the  courtiers  and  the  ecclesiastics  a  freer  hand. 
And  it  almost  seems  as  though  Jesus  disliked  the 
Romans  less  than  he  disliked  the  native  grandees.  Cer- 
tainly we  have  no  record  of  his  having  spoken  a  harsh 
word  concerning  the  Romans,  while  his  language  about 
the  Pharisees  never  lacks  vigour;  and  that  profligate 
Luie  13:32  princcHng,  the  Herod  of  his  day,  he  called 
a  fox.  A  successful  revolution  against  the  Romans 
would  not  remove  the  leprosy  that  was  eating  up  so- 
ciety ;  it  would  only  redistribute  it.  Nevertheless  Jesus 
saw  that  nothing  short  of  a  revolution  was  called  for 
by  the  state  of  the  case.  But  the  revolution  that  he 
saw  necessary  would  move  on  a  deeper  level  and  would 
deal  with  the  disease  itself  and  not  with  its  symptoms. 
And  it  was  such  a  revolution  that  he  preached. 

We  have  heard  latterly  a  good  deal  about  the  need 
of  a  change  of  heart  as  the  first  condition  of  a  "new 
w^orld."  It  is  true  that  few  people  have  paid  serious 
heed  to  w^hat  they  have  heard,  supposing  that,  after 
all,  political  schemes,  economic  changes  and  the  like  are 
much  shorter  roads  to  that  new  world  of  justice  and 
peace  towards  which  men's  eyes  looked  so  eagerly  dur- 
ing the  Great  War.  But  to  anyone  that  looks  out  on 
this  world  of  men  and  things  with  any  measure  of 

15 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

moral  insight,  it  should  be  plain  beyond  need  of  proof 
that  we  shall  have  no  manner  of  new  world  with- 
out a  moral  revolution,  which  is  another  way  of  speak- 
ing of  a  change  of  heart.  This  was  precisely  what 
Jesus  believed  in  his  own  day;  and  the  first  thing 
he  did  in  his  public  ministry  was  to  call  for  such  a 
moral  revolution.     His  first  word  was  Repent. 

When  we  speak  of  repentance  we  are  commonly 
apt  to  think  of  it  as  penitence.  Penitence  is  sorrow 
for  sin,  but  repentance  means  turning  away  from  sin. 
Penitence  is  an  emotion,  repentance  is  an  act  of  will. 
And  while  it  is  true  that  there  can  be  no  repentance 
without  a  measure  of  penitence,  yet  it  is  the  fact  that 
the  deepest  penitence  is  that  which  follows  repentance. 
Literally  the  word  as  it  is  used  in  the  Gospels  means 
a  "change  of  mind,'*  but  its  plain  meaning  upon  the 
lips  of  Jesus  is  the  will  to  live  a  different  kind  of 
life.  When  Jesus  said,  Repent,  he  meant,  Turn  around, 
and  it  was  a  turning  away  from  that  self-love  which 
set  a  man  in  opposition  both  to  God  and  to  his  neigh- 
bour. It  was  a  single  act  with  a  double  reaction.  It 
would  set  a  man  right  with  God  and  with  his  fellow, 
not  set  him  right  with  one  by  setting  him  right  w^ith 
the  other,  but  set  him  right  with  both  at  one  stroke 
by  giving  him  a  change  of  heart. 

But  Jesus  did  not  stop  at  that  point.  Repentance 
is  after  all  a  negative  thing,  and  men  are  too  apt  to 
be  content  with  negative  achievement.  Again  and 
again  in  history  men  have  supposed  that  if  they  could 

i6 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

break  down  some  exclusive  privilege  or  remove  some 
public  evil,  the  golden  age  would  follow  as  a  matter 
of  course.  But  it  has  never  done  so;  on  the  con- 
trary, it  has  often  opened  the  door  to  greater  evils. 
The  French  Revolution  opened  the  door  to  Napoleon 
and  then  to  the  untempered  competition  of  our  modern 
industrial  civilisation.  Jesus,  in  a  vivid  little  parable, 
warns  us  against  merely  negative  reformations.  **The 
unclean  spirit,  when  he  is  gone  out  of  the  man,  pass- 
eth  through  waterless  places,  seeking  rest  and  findeth 
it  not.  Then  he  saith,  T  will  return  unto  my  house 
Mt.  12:43-45  whence  I  came  out,'  and  when  he  is  come 
he  findeth  it  empty,  swept  and  garnished.  Then  goeth 
he  and  taketh  seven  other  spirits  more  evil  than  him- 
self; and  they  enter  in  and  dwell  there."  The  great 
tragedy  of  revolution  is  that  the  destructive  impulse 
is  so  rarely  accompanied  by  a  definite  alternative  to  the 
past.  If  the  repentance  was  not  to  prove  futile  and 
pointless  there  must  go  with  it  a  new  rule  and  plan 
of  life. 


''My  kingdom  is  not  of  this  world:  if  my  kingdom 
were  of  this  world,  then  would  my  servants  iight  .  .  . 
hut  now  is  my  kingdom  not  from  hence." 

"Repent,"  said  Jesus,  "for  the  kingdom  of  heaven 
is  at  hand."    It  was  a  bold  thing  on  Jesus'  part  to  take 

17 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

this  word,  "the  kingdom  of  heaven"  or,  as  some 
scholars  have  translated  it,  the  ''realm  of  heaven"  or 
the  ''rule  of  God"  to  describe  that  new  rule  and  plan 
of  life  to  which  he  was  calling  his  fellow-countrymen. 
The  idea  was  in  common  circulation;  and  the  phrase 
itself  in  some  Aramaic  equivalent  was  probably  upon 
the  lips  of  the  people  at  the  time.  But  it  would  be  a 
very  considerable  error  to  suppose  that  Jesus  gave  to 
it  the  same  connotation  as  that  of  the  popular  use  of 
it.  Indeed,  it  is  one  of  the  dangers  of  the  critical  study 
of  the  Gospels  that  the  inquiry  into  the  contemporary 
sources  of  the  phrases  and  expressions  which  are  to 
be  found  in  the  body  of  Jesus'  teaching  tends  to  as- 
sume overmuch  that  the  previous  and  contemporary 
signification  of  these  terms  fixes  their  meaning  in 
Jesus'  use  of  them.  It  is  one  of  the  assumptions  of 
this  present  study,  based  upon  a  careful  examination 
of  the  point,  that  Jesus,  while  he  adopted  for  his  own 
purposes  certain  words  and  phrases  which  were  cur- 
rent in  his  time  and  which  possessed  a  certain  tech- 
nical meaning  in  the  contemporary  use,  nevertheless 
added  so  much  to  them  or  so  changed  the  emphasis  in 
them  that  they  became  in  his  hands  virtually  new  terms ; 
and  their  ultimate  meaning  must  be  found  not  in  their 
history  but  in  a  comparative  study  of  Jesus'  use  of 
them.  One  such  transfigured  term  is  the  "kingdom  of 
heaven"  or  "the  kingdom  of  God." 

When  Jesus  used  this  term,  his  hearers  were  un- 
doubtedly familiar  with  it.     But  the  image  it  evoked 

i8 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

in  their  minds  was  not  that  which  Jesus  had  in  his 
mind.  For  them,  the  "kingdom"  was  chiefly  a  poHtical 
thing,  an  external  order  of  Hfe  in  which  they  would 
be  free  and  happy.  As  we  have  seen,  these  people 
were  very  unhappy  and  not  at  all  free.  For  the  most 
part  they  laid  their  troubles  down  to  the  Roman  oc- 
cupation. And  they  were  looking  forward  to  a  "good 
time'*  in  which  their  troubles  would  be  ended.  They 
did  not  all  look  for  it  to  come  in  the  same  way.  Their 
Sinn  Feiners,  who  afterwards  came  to  be  known  as 
the  Zealots,  believed  that  the  only  way  to  hasten  the 
good  time  was  through  the  violent  overthrow  of  the 
Roman  power.  But  it  would  appear  that  the  people 
as  a  whole  despaired  of  its  coming  by  any  human 
agency.  They  had  come  to  believe  that  one  of  these 
days  God  would  take  the  matter  in  hand  himself, 
sweep  the  Romans  into  the  sea  and  establish  his  people 
in  a  proud  independence.  But  however  it  came,  the  one 
thing  they  were  all  looking  for  was  to  see  the  last  of 
the  Romans,  and  then  they  were  all  going  to  live 
happily  ever  afterwards. 

But  the  kingdom  which  Jesus  preached  to  them 
was  not  of  that  order.  This  good  time  that  you  are 
expecting,  he  seems  to  have  said  to  them,  this  "rule 
of  God"  of  which  you  speak  so  much  and  which  you 
understand  so  little,  is  at  hand,  here  by  you  and  round 
about  you;  and  you  can  have  it  whensoever  you  will. 
It  is  not  something  that  is  waiting  for  you  round  the 
corner  when  the  Romans  have  packed  their  traps  and 

19 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

gone  home,  not  something  that  is  going  to  break  out 
of  the  blue,  to-morrow  or  some  other  day.  The  king- 
dom of  God  is  at  hand,  among  you,  even  in  you.  Rise 
to  your  feet  and  possess  it.* 

Let  it  not  be  supposed  however  that  the  kingdom 
was  a  mere  gospel  of  consolation,  a  sort  of  refuge 
from  the  harsh  demands  of  life,  an  anodyne  for  the 
contemporary  distress.  Jesus  was  not  offering  to  men 
a  plan  for  making  life  endurable  under  the  hardships 
that  they  suffered.  He  was  deliberately  calling  men 
to  a  way  of  life  which  would  presently  undermine  the 
existing  political  and  ecclesiastical  order.  It  might 
on  the  face  of  it  seem  a  long  and  tedious  way  of  ac- 
complishing that  end;  and  we  can  well  imagine  that 
the  zealot  would  be  impatient  with  the  impracticability 
of  it.  But  Jesus  saw  that  violence,  whatever  promise 
of  swift  redress  it  might  appear  to  contain,  was  no 
solution  for  what  was  after  all  a  moral  problem.  We 
heard  a  little  time  ago  in  connection  with  a  certain 
labor  dispute,  of  a  policy  of  "boring  from  within,"  and 
it  was  this,  in  a  deeper  and  more  subtle  sense,  that 

*  There  are  passages  in  the  Gospels  in  which  the  kingdom 
is  spoken  of  as  something  in  the  future.  But  this  involves 
no  real  difficulty;  the  future  kingdom  is  the  perfect  consum- 
mation of  the  kingdom  which  is  at  present  realised  only  in 
part.  A  question  of  more  difficulty  is  whether  the  Gospels 
identify  the  future  kingdom  with  the  "world  (or  the  age) 
to  come"  or  with  the  kingdom  of  the  expected  Messiah.  This 
is  however  chiefly  a  problem  for  the  critic ;  what  is  of  mo- 
ment to  us  is  to  work  out  the  implications  for  ourselves  of 
<he  undoubted  spiritual  and  inward  content  which  was  Jesus' 
ixindamental  thought  concerning  the  kingdom. 

20 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Jesus  was  bent  on  doing.  He  knew  that  his  business 
lay  at  a  deeper  level  than  that  of  the  politician  or  the 
rebel,  whether  in  church  or  state.  He  was  seeking  to 
evoke  a  new  life  which  would  function  independently 
of  the  existing  institutions  and  would  destroy  them 
by  making  them  functionless.  In  the  parable  of  the 
Mt.  9:17  wine-skins  he  pleads  that  the  old  wine-skins 

be  left  undamaged.  The  new  task  was  that  of  making 
a  new  vintage  and  new  wine-skins  for  it.  In  the  process 
of  time  the  old  wine  w^ould  settle  on  its  lees,  and  the 
old  wine-skins  would  be  discarded  for  want  of  use. 
So  Jesus  saw  the  political  and  ecclesiastical  institutions 
of  his  time  dying  of  inanition  because  the  real  life 
of  the  people  had  come  to  function  outside  of  them, 
and  had  created  its  own  institutions  for  its  own  needs. 

If,  so  far,  this  account  of  the  matter  makes  Jesus 
seem  too  preoccupied  with  a  merely  local  and  national 
situation,  there  is  a  twofold  answer. 

First,  Jesus  saw  in  the  national  problem  an  epitome 
of  the  world  problem.  Israel  was  a  parable  of  man- 
kind. While  it  is  true  that  he  made  but  one  brief 
sojourn  beyond  the  frontiers  of  Palestine,  the  outside 
world  had  crossed  those  frontiers  often  enough  to  show 
any  person  of  insight  what  its  real  quality  was.  Jesus 
knew  perfectly  well  what  went  on  in  the  great  world 
luke  22:25  without.  *'The  kings  of  the  Gentiles  lord 
it  over  them  and  they  that  have  authority  over  them 
are  called  Benefactors."  This  last  is  a  touch  of  irony, 
not  yet  out  of  date,  for  we  have  lived  to  hear  imperial- 

21 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ists  talk  of  bringing  the  ''blessings  of  civilisation"  to 
the  ''lesser  breeds  without  the  law,"  covering  exploita- 
tion with  a  cloak  of  philanthropy.  The  kingdoms  of 
this  world  have  their  own  kiiltur  and  their  own  tech- 
nique; and  Palestine  had  had  long  and  bitter  experience 
of  them.  An  intelligent  Jew  had  no  need  of  foreign 
travel  to  know  the  way  of  the  world,  if  he  knew  the 
history  of  his  own  people.  He  might  not  perhaps  per- 
ceive that  the  way  of  the  world  was  not  materially 
different  from  the  way  of  his  own  people,  but  Jesus 
with  his  clear  sense  of  moral  distinctions  saw  that 
between  the  Jew  and  the  Gentile,  there  was  (as  Paul 
said  later  on)  no  difference.  In  dealing  with  the  dis- 
temper of  his  own  people,  he  was  dealing  with  the  dis- 
temper of  the  race. 

Second,  it  is  clear  that  Jesus,  certainly  in  the  early 
stages  of  his  ministry,  and  in  all  probability  through- 
out, based  his  hope  of  the  redemption  of  the  world 
upon  the  redemption  of  his  own  people.  They  had  had 
a  long  and  varied  discipline  which  marked  them  out 
for  a  peculiar  function  in  the  plan  of  God.  Some 
of  the  later  Hebrew  prophets  saw  a  vision  of  Israel 
invested  with  a  role  of  spiritual  leadership  among  the 
nations  of  the  earth,  and  Jesus,  who  had  sprung  from 
the  little  remnant  of  "devout"  folk  who  waited  for  the 
"consolation  of  Israel,"  and  who  clung  to  the  old 
prophetic  tradition,  seems  to  have  cherished  the  same 
hope  for  his  people.  The  first  period  of  his  public 
ministry  was  spent  in  preaching  in  the  synagogues  of 

22 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Galilee,  in  the  hope  that  there  might  be  a  spiritual 
renewal  within  the  existing  reHgious  institutions.  This 
hope  had  to  be  abandoned;  but  apart  from  the  period 
which  was  spent  in  a  journey  with  the  disciples  in  the 
country  north  of  Palestine,  the  whole  public  ministry 
of  Jesus  was  exercised  in  relation  to  his  own  people, 
even  though  it  had  ceased  to  move  within  the  tradi- 
tional institutions.  From  first  to  last,  his  plan  was  to 
redeem  Israel,  in  the  faith  that  a  redeemed  Israel  would 
mean  at  last  a  redeemed  world. 


23 


CHAPTER  TWO 
THE    ROOTS    OF    THE    NEW    LIFE 

(Matt.    5:1-9;    6:1-5,    9-13;    7-25-34;    17:1-8;    Mk. 
10:13-25) 


"If  ye  then,  being  evil,  know  how  to  give  good  gifts 
unto  your  children,  how  much  more  shall  your  Father 
which  is  in  heaven  give  good  things  to  them  that  ask 
him?" 

BACK  of  everything  in  the  mind  of  Jesus  was  a 
simple  unwavering  confidence  in  the  friendH- 
ness  of  God.  He  was  not  the  first  to  call  God 
a  Father,  but  none  ever  called  him  by  that  name  so 
consistently  or  accepted  the  logic  of  the  name  with  so 
great  completeness.  In  the  Parable  of  the  Average 
Mt.  7:9-11  Father  he  frankly  accepts  human  father- 
hood as  a  faint  image  of  the  divine  fatherhood;  and 
he  habitually  uses  language  which  describes  God  as 
being  in  an  attitude  of  intimate  fatherly  solicitude 
Mt.6:8      toward  men.     ''Your  heavenly  Father  know- 

24 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

eth  what  things  ye  have  need  of,  before  ye  ask  Him." 
Mt.  10:29-31  ''Are  not  two  sparrows  sold  for  a  farth- 
ing? and  not  one  of  them  shall  fall  on  the  ground 
without  your  Father :  but  the  very  hairs  of  your  head 
are  all  numbered.  Fear  not,  therefore;  ye  are  of 
more  value  than  many  sparrows."  Men  needed  to 
realise  that  God  was  on  their  side.  It  was  not  an  easy 
lesson  for  those  people  to  learn.  Between  the  states- 
man and  the  churchman  they  lived  a  thin  and  precari- 
ous life,  and  of  the  security  of  life  that  all  men  crave 
for  they  had  little  or  none.  The  Roman  was  no  friend 
of  theirs.  Neither  was  the  Pharisee.  How  then 
should  God  who  seemed  to  allow  these  people  to  pros- 
per be  the  peasant's  friend  ?  Yet  Jesus  went  on  affirm- 
ing that  God  was  their  father.  He  saw  that  the  first 
thing  that  his  people  needed  was  courage  to  live.  They 
were  crushed  between  the  upper  and  nether  millstones, 
they  had  lost  heart,  were  ''distressed  and  scattered." 
Despair  had  overtaken  them;  they  lived  their  daily 
lives  on  the  basis  of  their  fears,  and  their  hope  of  the 
Good  Time  did  little  to  comfort  them  through  their 
miserable  days.  They  were  will-less  and  demoralised. 
And  for  this  condition  there  is  but  one  antidote, — 
faith,  which  is  the  will  to  face  life  on  the  assumption 
that  God  is  love. 

One  of  the  strangest  criticisms  that  has  been  passed 
on  Christianity  is  that  it  puts  a  premium  upon  weak- 
ness, and  that  its  main  gift  to  man  is  a  grace  that 
enables  him  to  endure  evil  conditions  that  he  cannot 

25 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

remove  or  remedy.  It  is  certainly  true  that  Christian- 
ity does  bring  such  a  gift  to  men,  but  it  is  a  curious 
and  indeed  an  inexcusable  misreading  of  the  Gospels 
to  suppose  that  this  is  the  supreme  gift  of  Christ. 
There  are — and  until  mankind  has  achieved  mastery 
over  nature  and  its  own  passions,  there  always  will 
be — times  and  seasons  when  our  chief  need  is  patience. 
But  the  word  ''faith"  as  used  in  the  gospels  implies 
something  much  greater  than  a  grace  of  submission. 
It  is  rather  a  kind  of  invincible  energy.  It  is  not  a 
power  by  which  life  can  be  made  tolerable  under  evil 
conditions  so  much  as  a  power  to  transform  those 
conditions.  It  is  not  a  means  by  which  one  may  thread 
a  precarious  path  through  the  wilderness  of  this  world, 
but  a  might  whereby  we  may  conquer  the  wilderness 
and  make  it  to  blossom  as  the  rose.  "If  ye  have  faith 
Mt.  17:20  as  a  grain  of  mustard  seed,  ye  shall  say 
unto  this  mountain,  Remove  hence  to  yonder  place; 
and  it  shall  remove;  and  nothing  shall  be  impossible 
unto  you" — which  is  only  a  vivid  way  of  saying  that 
there  need  not  be  within  the  whole  area  of  our  life  any 
such  thing  as  an  insoluble  problem,  or  an  insuperable 
difficulty  or  an  unrealisable  ideal.  Strange  doctrine  to 
preach  to  a  hopeless  and  impotent  peasantry;  yet  it 
was  only  the  simple  and  inevitable  logic  of  the  great 
assumption  with  which  Jesus  set  out.  *'If  God  is 
Rom.  8:31  for  US,"  as  St.  Paul  said  in  later  days, 
*Svho  is  against  us?" 

26 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


"I  came  that  they  may  haxve  life,  and  may  have  it 
abundantly" 

But  the  quickening  of  hope  was  for  Jesus  but  the 
beginning  of  things.  He  had  indeed  to  stir  the  people 
out  of  their  apathetic  acquiescence  in  things  as  they 
were  before  he  could  do  anything  else  for  them.  He 
had  to  make  them  believe  that  their  distresses  were 
not  incurable,  that  things  could  be  different  from  what 
they  were.  But  the  "good  news"  which  he  preached 
to  the  poor  was  not  a  promise  of  a  vague  "good  time 
coming."  It  was  indeed  not  what  the  people  expected 
— for,  as  we  have  seen,  they  darkly  looked  for  some 
political  deliverance — that  Jesus  promised  to  them.  He 
brought  to  them  an  offer  of  life. 

For  Jesus  the  greater  and  better  part  of  life  was 
out  of  sight.  But  he  found  men  living  the  mere  rind 
of  life,  wading  in  its  shallows,  dwelling  on  the  outside 
of  things, — some  spending  their  days  in  a  ceaseless 
round  of  toil  to  provide  for  themselves  and  their 
families  the  bare  necessaries  of  life,  and  others  in  a 
greedy  gathering  of  more  material  good  than  they 
needed;  but  both  alike  missing  the  real  point  of  life. 
Mt.  6:31-33  "Be  uot  auxious,"  he  said  to  the  former, 
"about  your  food  and  drink  and  clothing.  Your 
heavenly  Father  knoweth  that  ye  have  need  of  these 
things.     Seek  ye  first  the  kingdom  of  God  and  His 

27 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

righteousness."  And  of  the  latter  he  said,  ''A  man's 
Luke  12:15  life  consisteth  not  in  the  abundance  of  the 
things  he  possesseth,"  and  ''How  hardly  shall  they 
Mark  10:23  that  have  riches  enter  the  kingdom  of 
heaven!"  And  one  man  of  this  class  he  called  a  fool. 
He  summed  the  whole  matter  up  when  he  met  his  first 
temptation  with  an  old  saying:  ''Man  shall  not  live 
Mt.4:4  by  bread  alone,  but  by  every  word  that  pro- 
ceedeth  out  of  the  mouth  of  God." 

By  this,  Jesus  meant  that  just  as  there  is  a  natural 
craving  which  is  satisfied  by  bread,  so  there  is  another 
craving  no  less  natural  which  requires  for  its  satis- 
faction what  Jesus  calls  the  "word  of  God,"  by  which 
he  means  a  conscious  vitalising  vision  of  God  and 
fellowhip  with  Him.  It  was  of  this  same  longing  that 
Saint  Augustine  was  speaking.  "Thou  hast  made  us 
for  thyself  and  our  heart  is  never  at  rest  until  it  rest 
in  Thee."  William  Blake  once  said  that  the  body  was 
that  part  of  the  soul  that  we  can  see;  and  it  does  not 
appear  that  Jesus  was  much  concerned  with  that  antith- 
esis between  body  and  soul  of  which  we  make  so 
much.  He  was  not  primarily  concerned  with  the  soul 
and  its  salvation  as  we  conceive  of  these  things;  and 
the  Revised  Version  of  the  Bible  rightly  uses  the  word 
"life"  in  certain  places  where  the  Authorised  had 
"soul."  Jesus  thought  rather  in  terms  of  life.  He  saw 
men  living  "at  a  poor  dying  rate,"  living  a  mere  frac- 
tion of  their  possible  life.  Did  they  but  know  it,  there 
were  within  them  unfathomable  depths  of  life  which 

28 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

were  available  for  them  whensoever  they  had  the  wit 
and  the  will  to  call  them  up.  It  is  true  that  he  did 
not  despise  the  body  or  the  physical  life, — his  whole 
story  is  replete  with  instances  of  a  distinctively  physical 
ministry.  Nor  (we  may  presume)  was  this  ministry 
only  a  work  of  compassion.  He  knew  that  physical 
disorders  had  their  echoes  in  the  soul  and  militated 
against  fullness  of  life.  They  diverted  the  mind  from 
the  main  pursuit.  So  he  healed  men's  bodies;  but  he 
told  them  that  their  true  life  depended  upon  the  ''word 
that  cometh  from  the  mouth  of  God." 

In  the  middle  of  the  last  century  a  famous  London 
minister  wrote  a  book  which  he  called  ''How  to  Make 
the  Best  of  Both  Worlds,''  That  was  the  way  they 
looked  upon  it  in  those  days.  Here  are  two  worlds, 
the  world  that  now  is,  and  the  world  to  come,  each 
with  its  own  characteristic  prizes;  and  the  problem  of 
life  was  how  to  make  the  best  of  both  worlds, — how 
to  get  on  prosperously  in  this  world  and  how  to  get 
safely  into  the  next.  But  Jesus  did  not  see  the  matter 
in  this  light.  For  him  the  problem  of  life  was  hozv  to 
live  in  the  two  worlds  at  the  same  time.  This  is  what 
is  called  "eternal  life"  in  the  Fourth  Gospel,  and  when 
Jesus  said  that  he  came  that  men  might  have  life,  this 
is  the  life  of  which  he  was  thinking. 

There  are  in  the  main  three  attitudes  that  men  have 
taken  to  this  world.  First  is  the  view  that  the  world 
of  sense  is  the  only  world  there  is  and  that  it  is  our 
business  to  exploit  it  as  sedulously  as  we  may  for  our 

29 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

own  aggrandisement  and  pleasure.  The  second  is  the 
extreme  opposite  view,  taken  by  some  philosophers  and 
mystics,  that  this  world  of  sense  is  appearance  and  illu- 
sion, and  that  the  only  reality  is  the  invisible  world. 
The  third  is  the  view  held  by  some  ascetics  and  certain 
evangelical  sects,  that  this  world  is  all  too  real  and 
altogether  evil,  and  that  we  should  have  as  little  to  do 
with  it  as  we  can.  That  is  to  say,  men  have  looked 
upon  the  world  as  something  to  be  either  exploited, 
or  denied,  or  despised.  But  neither  of  these  attitudes 
did  Jesus  take.  He  did  not  exploit  or  deny  or  despise 
the  world.  He  took  the  world  for  granted  as  a  part 
of  the  universe  of  God.  Just  as  William  Blake,  when 
he  said  that  the  body  is  the  part  of  the  soul  that  you 
can  see  might  have  gone  on  to  say  that  the  world  is 
that  part  of  the  universe  that  you  can  see,  so  Jesus 
might  have  said  that  the  world  is  that  fragment  of 
the  Father's  House  that  is  exposed  to  human  sense. 
But  the  greater  part  is  out  of  sight  and  is  visible  only 
to  the  eye  of  faith. 

This  unseen  world  was  as  real  to  Jesus  as  the  world 
of  sense  is  real  to  the  ordinary  man;  and  he  would 
have  it  become  as  real  to  other  men  as  it  was  to  him. 
It  would  have  been  unthinkable  to  him  that  men  should 
ever  come  seriously  to  believe  that  their  life  was  wholly 
contained  within  this  tangible  visible  world;  and  that 
their  only  organs  of  perception  were  the  senses  and 
the  reasoning  faculty.  In  this  region,  he  would  have 
said.  You  are  only  on  the  threshold  of  life;  and  even 

30 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

then  you  cannot  perceive  this  concrete  sense-world 
aright  unless  you  see  in  it  and  through  it  a  good  deal 
more  than  your  eyes  can  see.  Live  the  life  of  sense, 
"by  bread  alone,"  and  you  will  live  only  in  this  world 
of  things,  and  things  will  be  your  masters;  but  live 
the  life  of  faith,  and  you  will  live  in  the  two  worlds 
at  once,  for  you  will  be  living  in  the  whole  of  God's 
universe  all  the  time. 

The  nature  and  quality  of  this  life  it  is  not  easy  to 
describe.  Even  Jesus,  who  lived  it  in  its  fullness,  did 
not  find  it  easy  to  tell  about  it.  This  was  due  partly 
to  the  dullness  and  the  apathy  of  the  people  with  whom 
he  had  to  do;  so  dull  and  inert  were  they  that  he  had 
to  startle  them  by  using  large  and  staggering  images 
Mt  i7'2o  ^^  moving  mountains  and  uprooting  syc- 
luteiTie  amore  trees.  That  was  however  not  the 
chief  reason.  The  difficulty  in  describing  this  life  lies 
in  the  subject-matter  and  in  the  limitations  of  language. 

Speech  is  an  instrument  which  has  been  fashioned 
by  life  in  the  process  of  its  unfolding  for  the  purpose 
of  human  fellowship.  But  the  materials  out  of  which 
speech  has  been  evolved  belong  to  the  world  of  time 
and  space.  This  can  be  seen  plainly  from  the  words 
which  have  been  minted  to  describe  that  part  of  life 
that  men  have  always  dimly  felt  to  lie  beyond  what 
they  can  see.  We  speak  of  it  as  supernatural,  or  supra- 
sensible,  or  infinite;  and  when  we  speak  of  it  as  eternal 
we  mean  that  it  is  either  timeless  or  endless.  We 
describe  the  hidden  universe  by  saying  what  it  is  not. 

31 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

We  have  as  yet  no  glossary  for  the  unseen.  So  that 
when  Jesus  or  any  one  who  has  the  necessary  spiritual 
insight  states  a  proposition  that  is  true  to  the  whole  of 
life, — life,  that  is,  which  is  lived  in  the  seen  and  in  the 
unseen  at  once,  he  has  to  do  it  in  paradox.  A  paradox 
is  a  truth  stated  in  the  form  of  a  verbal  contradiction ; 
and  the  teaching  of  Jesus  is  full  of  paradoxes.  "He 
Mt  10-39  ^^^^  loseth  his  life  shall  find  it."  "To  him 
Mt.  13:12  ^\^^^  It^^^i^  s\\2i\\  bc  givcn,  and  from  him  that 
hath  not  even  that  which  he  hath  shall  be  taken  away." 
Mt.  5:5  "Blessed  are  the  meek :  for  they  shall  inherit 

the  earth."  It  is  a  twisting  of  language,  a  bending  of 
words  back  upon  themselves  to  say  the  unsayable.  Of 
all  this  the  moral  is  tolerably  plain.  We  shall  have  the 
clue  to  the  words  of  Jesus  when  we  have  the  life  of 
which  he  speaks. 

It  may  be  added  in  this  connection  that  we  have 
here  the  clue  to  what  are  called  the  "hard  sayings"  of 
Jesus.  In  some  of  his  sayings,  he  imposes  upon  us 
conduct  that  seems  utterly  beyond  our  capacity, — turn- 
Mt.  5:39  ^^^  ^^^^  other  cheek,  forgiving  unto  seventy 

Mt  18:22  times  seven,  and  the  like.  The  thing,  we 
say,  is  impossible ;  and  Jesus  does  not  mean  us  to  take 
it  literally.  But  it  is  impossible  simply  because  we 
do  not  possess  the  life  to  which  that  sort  of  conduct 
comes  naturally,  and  to  which  nothing  is  impossible. 
The  life  to  which  Jesus  called  men  is  of  a  scale  and 
power  beyond  anything  that  we  can  conceive  in  the 
light  of  nature. 

32 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


^'Except  ye  turn  and  become  as  little  children,  ye 
shall  in  no  wise  enter  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven/' 

To  enter  this  new  life,  there  must  be,  as  we  have 
seen,  repentance,  a  break  with  the  past.  The  custom- 
ary motions  of  Hfe  have  to  be  reversed.  A  new  tech- 
nique of  Hfe  has  to  be  acquired.  The  accepted  valua- 
tions of  life  must  be  superseded.  And  the  first  thing 
that  has  to  go  is  externality.  For  externality  is  a 
categorical  denial  of  the  unseen. 

Jesus  and  the  people  had  before  their  eyes  a  com- 
pany of  persons  who  were  apt  in  all  the  arts  of 
externality.  They  cared  little  hovz  foul  the  inside 
of  the  cup  might  be  so  long  as  the  outside  was 
Mt.6:i  clean.  These  were  the  people  who  "did  their 
Mt,6:5  righteousness  before  men,  to  be  seen  of 
them,"  who  "stood  praying  in  the  synagogues  and  on 
the  street-corners,"  addressing  their  prayers  to  a  gal- 
lery of  their  fellowmen.  Here,  says  Jesus,  is  the  pre- 
cise antithesis  of  what  you  should  be.  For  to  him 
these  men  were  virtually  atheists,  w^ho  denied  "the 
Mt.6:6  Father  which  seeth  in  secret."  And  even 
worse,  they  exploited  the  things  of  God  in  the  interests 
of  their  own  self-esteem.  That  was  why  Jesus  called 
Mt.6:3  them  hypocrites,  "play-actors,"  men  who 
were  playing  a  part.     In  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  men 

33 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

must  have  what  the  Psahnist  called  ''truth  in  the  in- 
Mt.5:8  ward  parts."  ''Blessed,"  said  Jesus,  "are 
the  pure  in  heart,  the  sincere,  the  single-minded;  for 
they  shall  see  God." 

And  with  sincerity,  there  must  go  an  unaffected 
simplicity  of  mind.  We  must,  says  Jesus,  become  as 
little  children.  This,  for  sensitive  souls,  is  the  hardest 
of  all  Jesus'  hard  sayings.  For  our  minds  have  so 
long  and  so  sadly  parted  with  their  virginity ;  they  are 
contaminated  and  clogged  by  that  ponderous  (but  oh! 
so  futile)  worldly  wisdom  which  we  suppose  ourselves 
to  have  gathered  with  the  years.  We  have  acquired 
what  men  call  practicality,  hard-headedness,  savoir 
faire, — a  sophistication  which  is  in  the  end  but  a  hard- 
ening of  the  tissues  of  the  soul.  But  to  reverse  all  the 
acquired  habits  of  the  years  and  begin  all  over  again! 
Yet  so  it  must  be  if  we  are  to  gain  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  and  the  reality  of  life.  For  the  simplicity  of  the 
child  is  a  sensibility  to  the  unseen.  Is  it  not  written 
Luke  10:21  that  God  rcvcals  to  babes  what  He  hides 
from  the  wise  and  prudent, — those  things  that  are  so 
much  greater  than  anything  we  can  say  about  them? 
President  Eliot  once  said  that  if  a  dog  or  a  child,  after 
looking  you  in  the  face,  refuses  for  any  reason  other 
than  timidity  to  come  to  you,  you  had  better  go  home 
and  examine  yourself.  This  is  a  true  and  luminous 
saying.  The  child  has  its  own  "wireless,"  which  brings 
it  information  that  is  denied  to  the  wise  and  prudent. 

"Heaven  lies  about  us  in  our  infancy" ;  and  that  is 

34 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

more  than  a  piece  of  pretty  sentimentality.  The  thing 
is  so,  only  we  have  become  too  case-hardened  and 
opaque-minded  to  recognise  it. 

The  drift  of  pinions,  would  we  hearken 
Beats  at  our  own  clay-shuttered  doors. 

"Know  you,"  asks  the  poet  who  sang  these  lines,  the 
blessed  Francis  Thompson,  "know  you  what  it  is  to 
be  a  child?  It  is  to  be  something  very  different  from 
the  man  of  today.  It  is  to  have  a  spirit  yet  stream- 
ing from  the  waters  of  baptism ;  it  is  to  believe  in  love, 
to  believe  in  loveliness,  to  believe  in  belief;  it  is  to  be 
so  little  that  the  elves  can  reach  to  whisper  in  your 
ear;  it  is  to  turn  pumpkins  into  coaches,  and  mice  into 
horses,  and  nothing  into  everything;  for  each  child 
has  its  fairy  godmother  in  its  own  soul;  it  is  to  live 
in  a  nutshell  and  count  yourself  the  king  of  infinite 
space;  it  is 

To  see  a  world  in  a  grain  of  sand. 

And  heaven  in  a  wild  flower; 
Hold  infinity  in  the  palm  of  your  hand, 

And  eternity  in  an  hour." 

Maxk  10:14  And  "of  such  is  the  kingdom  of  heaven." 
Of  course,  we  cannot  acquire  the  child-spirit  on  the 
spot,  nor  indeed  in  many  days.  It  will  take  us  long 
to  unswathe  our  minds  from  the  thick  blinding  folds 
of  our  sophistications.     But  with  patience  it  can  be 

35 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

done.    What  is  more,  if  we  want  life,  it  must  be  done. 
John  3:3  ''Exccpt  a  man  be  born  anew,  he  cannot 

see  the  kingdom  of  God." 


''Ask  and  it  shall  he  given  you;  seek,  and  ye  shall 
find;  knock,  and  it  shall  he  opened  unto  you.'' 

But  what  are  we  to  do  with  this  child-mind  when 
we  have  it  ?  The  answer  is  surely  in  the  question ;  for 
what  should  the  child-mind  do  but  seek  the  parent- 
mind? 

Prayer  occupies  a  very  considerable  place  in  the 
teaching  of  Jesus,  and  a  still  more  considerable  place 
in  his  life.  He  does  not  argue  about  it  save  only  by 
one  or  two  analogies  from  human  behaviour  to  show 
how  inevitable  a  thing  it  is  that  God  should  attend  to 
his  children's  prayers.  For  the  rest  he  takes  it  for 
granted,  much  as  he  takes  eating  and  breathing  for 
granted, — something  that  men  did  because  it  was 
natural  for  them  to  do  it,  once  they  had  found  them- 
selves. 

This  is  not  the  place  to  discuss  the  doctrine  and 
practice  of  prayer  in  general.  It  is  however  material 
to  our  purpose  to  observe  that  prayer  in  its  perfect 
expression  seemed  to  Jesus  to  be  an  act  whereby  a  man 
brings  himself  Into  harmony  with  the  will  of  God.  We 
are  sometimes  apt  to  think  of  it  as  something  that 

36 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

bends  the  will  of  God  to  our  purposes  and  desires.  The 
present  writer  once  lived  on  the  top  of  a  hill,  and  he 
became  accustomed  to  the  sight  of  bicycles  which  were 
fitted  with  a  little  motor  attachment  in  order  to  help 
the  rider  up  the  hill.  And  that  is  pretty  much  what 
prayer  means  to  most  people.  It  is  a  sort  of  motor 
attachment  to  life  by  which  we  are  able  to  ride  uphill, 
to  do  things  that  we  should  otherwise  be  unable  to  do 
for  ourselves.  But  prayer  is  not  a  special  exercise 
for  emergencies,  a  means  of  getting  us  out  of  tight 
corners,  or  to  enable  us  to  overcome  difficulties.  It  is 
rather  an  act  in  which  we  gather  up  and  express  our 
own  longing  to  be  brought  into  unity  with  the  will  of 
God.  Nor  is  it  to  be  expressed  in  terms  of  mere  sub- 
mission to  the  will  of  God.  When  Jesus  teaches  us 
to  pray  and  what  to  pray  for,  the  things  that  he  puts  on 
our  lips  to  pray  for  are  things  that  commit  us  to  a 
kind  of  cooperation  with  God.  When  we  say  what  is 
called  the  "Lord's  Prayer,"  we  ask  for  nothing  which 
we  ourselves  are  not  required  to  aid  in  accomplishing. 
But  prayer  reaches  a  still  higher  plane  when  it  is 
assiduously  continued  in.  That  plane  is  when  petition 
ceases  and  only  communion  remains.  On  several  oc- 
Mt.  14:23  casions  Jesus,  we  are  told,  went  up  into  the 
i.uke9:28        mountain  and  to  desert  places  to  pray;  and 

Mark  1-35  ,  ,  •    i        .  ,,^ 

Luke  5:16  oucc  he  Spent  the  night  m  prayer.  We 
are  not  told  anything  of  the  mysterious  commerce 
that  went  on  between  Jesus  and  his  Father;  but  we 
may  not  doubt  that  those  solitary  communings  were 

37 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  very  springs  of  his  hfe  and  power.  And  equally 
we  may  not  doubt  that  in  such  sustained  and  secret 
communion  with  God  do  the  springs  of  our  true  life 
lie.  It  would  be  hard  to  single  out  a  need  more  plain 
and  more  importunate  to-day  than  the  recovery  of  the 
practice  of  meditation.  It  is  not  an  art  easy  to  acquire, 
and  we  have  first  to  overcome  the  enormous  handicap 
of  our  fear  of  being  alone.  We  moderns  have  lived 
so  constantly  in  public  that  there  is  nothing  we  are 
so  much  afraid  of  as  solitude.  And  even  then,  when 
we  have  conquered  our  aversion  to  solitude,  we  have 
to  begin  our  self-training  in  the  art  of  purposeful 
meditation.  Nowadays,  we  are  indisposed  to  turn  to 
the  old  masters  of  the  art  for  instruction — the  saints 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  But  some  day  we  shall  rediscover 
the  neglected  wealth  that  is  stored  in  the  great  classics 
of  mediaeval  devotion.  Meantime  we  must  stumble 
along  as  best  we  can.  For  we  are  not  habituated  to 
the  ether  of  the  unseen  and  cannot  see  in  its  strange 
light.  Here  is  the  testimony  of  a  modern  who  has 
made  the  great  experiment,  George  Russell  (A.  E.), 
the  Irish  poet :  "I  felt  as  one  who  steps  out  of  day  into 
the  colourless  night  of  a  cavern,  and  that  was  because  I 
had  suddenly  reversed  the  habitual  motions  of  life. 
We  live  normally  seeing  through  the  eyes,  hearing 
through  the  ears,  stirred  by  the  senses,  moved  by  bodily 
powers,  and  receiving  only  such  spiritual  knowledge 
as  may  pass  through  a  momentary  purity  of  our  being. 
On  the  mystic  path  we  create  our  own  light,  and  at 

38 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

first  we  struggle  blind  and  baffled,  seeing  nothing,  hear- 
ing nothing,  unable  to  think,  unable  to  imagine.  We 
seem  deserted,  by  dream,  vision  or  inspiration,  and 
our  meditation  barren  altogether.  But  let  us  persist 
through  weeks  or  months,  and  sooner  or  later  that 
stupor  disappears.  Our  faculties  readjust  themselves 
and  do  the  work  we  will  them  to  do.  Never  did  they 
do  their  work  so  well.  The  dark  caverns  of  the  brain 
begin  to  grow  luminous.  We  are  creating  our  own 
light.  By  heat  of  will  and  aspiration  we  are  trans- 
muting what  is  gross  in  the  subtle  ethers  through 
which  the  mind  works.  As  the  dark  bar  of  metal  be- 
gins to  glow  at  first  redly,  and  then  at  white  heat,  or 
as  ice  melts  and  is  alternately  fluid,  vapor,  gas,  and 
at  last  a  radiant  energy,  so  do  these  ethers  become 
purified  and  alchemically  changed  into  luminous  es- 
sences, and  they  make  a  new  vesture  for  the  soul  and 
link  us  to  mid-world  or  heavenward,  where  they  too 
have  their  true  home.  How  quick  the  mind  is !  How 
vivid  is  the  imagination!  We  are  lifted  above  the 
tumult  of  the  body.  The  heat  of  the  blood  disappears 
below  us.  We  draw  nigher  to  ourselves.  The  heart 
longs  for  the  hour  of  meditation  and  hurries  to  it. 
And  when  it  comes  we  rise  within  ourselves  as  a  diver 
too  long  under  water  rises  to  breathe  the  air,  to  see 
the  light." 

It  is  just  like  learning  to  swim.  You  go  into  the 
water  and  make  the  swimming  motions.  Nothing  hap- 
pens,— ^you  might  as  well  be  lead.     But  one  day  it 

39 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

happens,  and  you  never  can  tell  just  how  it  has  hap- 
pened, that  you  swim  a  stroke  or  two.  After  that  it 
is  simply  a  matter  of  practice;  and  the  day  comes  when 
you  feel  at  home  in  the  water  and  can  do  in  it  what 
you  will.  So  it  is  here.  For  a  time  nothing  happens ; 
but  if  we  persist  we  come  to  feel  at  home  in  this  new 
medium,  to  be  able  to  breathe  its  air,  to  see  in  its 
strange  light ;  and  at  last,  to  see  and  share  that  abiding 
reality  which  is  greater  than  anything  that  can  be  told 
about  it,  which  awes  us  into  silence  but  transfigures 
us  into  life. 

Nevertheless,  we  should  be  greatly  in  error  if  we 
supposed  that  this  is  all  that  matters,  or  that  this  ex- 
perience is  the  whole  of  life.  When  we  become  familiar 
with  this  inner  world  we  are  apt  like  Peter  to  say, — 
when  in  an  unexpected  moment  he  had  caught  a 
Mt.i7:4  glimpse  of  its  wonder, — "It  is  good  for 
us  to  be  here;  let  us  build  tabernacles."  But  the  Lord 
of  life  would  not  have  us  tabernacle  in  the  secret  place 
away  from  the  fret  and  trouble  of  common  life.  And 
so  Peter  had,  and  so  have  we  all,  to  foot  it  down  into 
the  valley  where  all  the  old  intractable  problems  are 
still  abroad.  This  is  the  orbit  of  this  life, — the  path 
that  lies  between  the  mountain-tops  which  are  visited 
by  angels  and  the  valleys  which  are  infested  by  devils. 
And  as  you  grow  familiar  with  this  mountain-path  it 
shrinks,  the  mountain-top  and  the  valley  draw  nearer 
to  each  other,  ever  nearer,  until  at  last  you  find  your- 
self standing  on  the  mountain-top  and  in  the  valley 

40 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

at  the  same  time.  Then  you  can  see  heaven  and  earth 
in  a  blessed  comminghng,  and  behold,  with  Francis 
Thompson, 

The  traffic  of  Jacob's  ladder 

Pitched  between  heaven  and  Charing  Cross, 

and 

Christ  walking  on  the  waters. 
Not  of  Gennesaret  but  Thames. 

And  it  does  not  stop  there.  One  finds  a  world 
transformed.  Things  are  not  what  once  they  seemed. 
You  will  find  yourself  loving  what  once  you  hated  and 
hating  what  once  you  loved.  You  will  see  men  play- 
ing the  old  games  in  the  market  place,  being  burnt  up 
by  the  ancient  fires  of  greed  and  gold,  and  you  will 
wonder  what  on  earth  they  are  doing  it  for.  But 
best  of  all  you  see  a  strange  glory  in  the  faces  of 
men  and  women,  and  a  new  loveliness  in  the  faces 
of  the  little  children.  And  you  will  say  to  yourself? 
"I  never  saw  the  face  of  a  man  before,  nor  yet  the 
smile  of  a  little  child.  But  whereas  I  once  was  blind, 
now  I  see.  The  name  of  this  street  is  Bethel,  the  house 
of  God,  the  gate  of  heaven."  You  will  go  about  God's 
world  and  see  the  shekinah  gleaming  on  the  breast  of 
every  common  man  and  every  common  face  aflame 
with  God. 


41 


CHAPTER  THREE 
LIFE  AND  THINGS 


(Matt.  6:19-21  ;  7:13-24;  9:16-17;  20:1-16;  22:15-22. 
Mk.  2:23-28;  Luke  10:38-42;  18:1-8;  19:41-44) 


''Narrow  is  the  gate,  and  straitened  tlie  way  that 
leadeth  unto  life" 

WE  have  in  recent  years  grown  familiar  with 
the  use  of  the  word  values  to  describe  the 
things  that  a  man  thinks  worth  Hving  for; 
and  his  "scale  of  values"  will  be  an  arrangement  of 
those  things  in  the  order  of  their  desirability  to  him.  Of 
such  values  we  may  say  that  they  are  broadly  of  two 
kinds:  "temporal"  or  "material"  and  "spiritual."  In 
Jesus'  day  there  were  plenty  of  people  whose  lives 
were  governed  by  material  values, — fame,  power, 
wealth  and  the  like;  and  these  same  people  are  with 
us  still.  Their  name  is  legion;  and  with  a  few  excep- 
tions, they  are  all  of  us.  Here  and  there  you  may  find 
an  oddity  who  orders  his  life  on  the  basis  of  spiritual 

42 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

values,  and  it  is  characteristic  of  our  age  that  such  a 
man  is  regarded  as  a  sort  of  idiot. 

The  distinction  between  spiritual  and  material  values 
may  be  roughly  described  in  this  way — whether  a  man 
thinks  that  the  things  worth  living  for  are  within  him 
or  outside  of  him,  whether  he  finds  them  in  his  own 
soul  or  in  the  world  round  about  him.  There  can  be 
no  question  at  all  as  to  the  class  of  values  that  Jesus 
accepted  and  pursued.  We  have  his  word  for  it  that 
a  man's  life  does  not  consist  in  the  abundance  of  the 
ink©  10-41  things  that  he  possesses.  "Few  things  are 
(B-v-nW.)  needful,"  as  he  told  Martha.  One  does 
not  need  many  things  for  the  realisation  of  life.  It  is 
not  so  much  the  amount  of  things  that  one  may  ac- 
quire but  the  mind  that  one  brings  to  the  things  one 
has  that  makes  for  fullness  of  life.  A  modern  writer 
has  said  that  "life  is  a  number  of  little  things  acutely 
realised,"  and  it  is  precisely  in  this  power  of  realisation 
that  the  modern  world  is  tragically  poor.  So  poor  are 
we  that  we  can  conceive  of  no  way  of  getting  the  most 
out  of  life  save  by  spreading  the  stuff  of  life  out  over 
a  large  number  of  things;  and  one  needs  only  to  look 
out  upon  the  world  to-day  to  realise  where  this  leads. 
We  taste  many  things  lightly  and  nothing  deeply.  And 
so  we  are  for  ever  compelled  to  extend  the  range  over 
which  we  search  out  those  things  that  are  strong 
enough  in  taste  to  satisfy  our  blase  and  exacting 
palates.  The  result  is  that  in  food,  dress,  and  recrea- 
tion we  have  almost  become  specialists  in  the  gro- 

43 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tesque,  the  bizarre  and  the  prurient.  What  we  bring 
with  us  to  the  enjoyment  of  Hfe  is  but  an  appetite, 
and  in  consequence  we  end  with  an  appetite.  That 
endowment  of  imagination,  insight,  interpretation, 
spiritual  possession,  which  we  should  bring  with  us  to 
the  experience  of  life  and  which  could  fill  our  life  with 
the  most  exquisite  joy  in  the  appreciation  of  a  few 
simple  near-by  things,  that  we  lack.  Jesus  did  not 
have  to  look  far  afield  in  his  own  day  for  an  instance 
of  this  same  poverty.  The  Pharisee  was  greedy  of 
the  praise  of  the  town,  because  he  had  no  resources 
within.* 

It  comes  to  this:  If  a  man  has  little  within,  he 
seeks  much  without.  If  he  has  much  within,  he  looks 
for  little  without.  From  Jesus'  point  of  view,  we  are 
classified  by  what  we  are  in  ourselves;  and  we  shall 
inevitably  show  without  what  we  are  within.  This 
is  a  very  trite  reflection ;  yet  it  is  not  useless  to  remind 
oneself  of  it  in  an  age  when  the  principle  of  classifica- 
tion is  not  what  a  man  is  but  what  he  has. 

When  Jesus  said  to  Martha  that  ''few  things  were 
needful  or  one  thing,"  it  was  no  occasional  utterance, 
but  sprang  from  his  whole  attitude  to  life.  Too  many 
things  were,  as  he  had   frequently  observed,  an  en- 

*It  should  perhaps  be  said  that  while  this  book  inevitably 
reflects  the  unfavourable  view  which  the  gospels  seem  to  hold 
of  the  Pharisees,  there  is  other  evidence  which  justifies  a  more 
generous  judgment  of  them  as  a  class.  And  in  the  gospels  Aye 
encounter  some  Pharisees  who  seem  undeserving  of  the  se- 
vere strictures  passed  upon  the  sect. 

44 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

cumbrance,  a  handicap  to  real  living.  When  he  bade 
Mt- 19:21  the  rich  young  ruler  sell  his  possessions 
and  give  them  away,  he  was  not  putting  his  good  faith 
to  the  proof.  He  meant  what  he  said  literally,  for  he 
saw  that  the  youth  could  make  little  headway  in  the 
pursuit  of  eternal  life  while  he  was  carrying  so  much 
heavy  baggage.  The  rich  may  enter  the  kingdom  of 
heaven,  but  only  with  difficulty.  It  is  of  the  nature 
of  a  miracle  if  they  get  there.  Their  riches  stand  in 
the  way.  St.  Francis  was  essentially  right  when  he 
preached  the  doctrine  of  poverty  to  his  followers.  The 
task  of  attaining  eternal  life  requires  so  much  of  a 
man's  attention  that  he  simply  cannot  afford  the  dis- 
tracting care  of  property.  Nor  can  he  without  court- 
ing failure  spread  his  life  out  over  too  many  things. 
Mt.  7:13-14  There  is  a  broad  road,  says  Jesus,  that 
leads  to  destruction;  it  is  a  narrow  way  that  leads  to 
life.  When  Jesus  uses  the  words  hroad  and  narrow 
he  does  not  mean  them  to  be  taken  merely  as  synonyms 
for  vicious  and  virtuous.  He  is  simply  warning  men 
against  spreading  out  life  too  thin  and  calling  them 
to  concentration.  There  is  a  narrowness  which  is 
death;  there  is  no  less  a  narrowness  which  is  life.  We 
may  spend  life  to  excess  even  upon  things  in  themselves 
legitimate  and  even  good;  and  if  such  priceless  things 
Mt  5:29-30  as  a  hand  or  an  eye  stand  in  the  way  of  our 
quest  of  life,  we  do  well  to  get  rid  of  them  rather 
than  to  miss  life  altogether.     In  a  word,  the  life  to 

45 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

which  Jesus  calls  us  cannot  be  realised  without  a  rigor- 
ous simplicity  of  habit. 

Not  that  such  a  simplicity  is  valuable  in  itself.  Its 
value  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  enables  us  to  give  our- 
selves without  distraction  to  the  "one  thing  needful." 
Martha  was  in  her  hospitable  way  all  fuss  and  business, 
and  Mary  was  in  her  eyes  just  then  an  idle  hussy  who 
should  be  taken  to  task  for  wasting  her  time.  It  does 
(we  may  as  well  confess  it)  upset  our  modern  notions 
Luke  10:38-42  of  propriety  that  Jesus  should  take 
Mary's  part  against  Martha :  and  we  give  the  story  a 
rather  forced  theological  interpretation  that  misses  the 
point  of  it  in  order  to  save  Jesus  from  the  imputation 
of  encouraging  laziness.  Yet  what  Jesus  meant  was  that 
Martha  was  troubling  her  soul  with  an  excess  of  busi- 
ness and  that  she  was  wasting  her  time  in  doing  so. 
Mary  had  chosen  the  good  part  simply  in  being  quiet 
and  unpreoccupied  so  that  she  might  listen  and  hear 
things  that  are  not  to  be  heard  by  people  who  live  all 
the  time  amid  the  clatter  of  dishes.  Mary  was  doing 
what  would  enable  her  to  feel  her  soul.  Many  of  us 
have  not  heard  from  our  souls  this  many  a  day;  we 
have  had  no  word  out  of  the  unseen ;  for  we  have  been 
living  too  intimately  and  deeply  in  the  clamor  of  the 
street,  amid  the  strident  noises  of  this  world  of  sense. 
We  too  are  troubled  about  many  things.  Indeed,  as 
Emerson  said  long  ago,  ''things  are  in  the  saddle  and 
ride  us." 

46 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


''Do  men  gather  grapes  of  thorns  or  Hgs  of  thistles?" 

One  need  only  recall  the  frequency  with  which  Jesus 
uses  the  word  heart  to  remember  how  consistent  was 
the  emphasis  which  he  laid  upon  the  hidden  and  in- 
ward aspect  of  life.  "Out  of  the  abundance  of  the 
Mt.  12:34-35  heart  the  mouth  speaketh.  The  good  man 
out  of  his  good  treasure  bringeth  forth  good  things, 
and  the  evil  man  out  of  his  evil  treasure  bringeth  forth 
evil  things.'*  This  principle  of  inwardness  governed 
the  thought  of  Jesus  throughout.  It  was  the  principle 
by  which  he  judged  conduct,  institutions,  and  the  whole 
varied  human  scene.  It  was  his  "acid  test"  for  the 
acceptances  and  conventions  on  which  the  civilisation 
of  his  day  rested. 

For  instance,  the  customary  moral  judgment  was 
passed  upon  a  man's  performance.  He  was  "righteous" 
in  the  degree  that  he  did  certain  things.  There  was  a 
certain  number  of  obligations  which  he  was  required 
to  discharge,  and  if  he  discharged  them  au  pied  de  la 
lettre,  he  stood  morally  irreproachable.  But  one  of  the 
plainest  facts  of  Jesus'  observation  was  that  men  might 
fully  discharge  the  recognised  moral  obligations  and 
yet  be  guilty  of  gross  inhumanity,  as  for  instance. 
Mart  12:40  devouring  widows'  houses.  He  saw  that 
it  was  possible  to  keep  the  letter  of  the  law  and  at  the 
same  time  to  deny  its  spirit,  indeed  to  deny  the  spirit 

47 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

by  the  very  exactness  with  which  one  observed  the 
letter.  A  man  might  harbor  a  lascivious  thought,  but 
if  he  abstained  from  the  lewd  act  he  was  still  within 
the  law.  Yet  from  any  thoroughgoing  and  realistic 
moral  standpoint,  the  evil  thought  is  as  evil  as  the 
Mt.5:28  evil  act,  and  the  principle  that  forbade  the 
act  logically  forbade  the  thought.  Similarly  the  inner 
Mt.  5:2i-a2  principle  which  forbids  murder  also  for- 
bids the  anger  that  leads  to  the  murder  and  the  offence 
that  provokes  the  anger.  Jesus'  way  was  to  track  the 
evil  deed  to  its  lair  in  the  evil  heart.  "Out  of  the  heart 
Mt.  15:19  come  forth  evil  thoughts,  murders,  adul- 
teries, fornications,  thefts,  false  witness,  railings." 
The  thing  that  mattered  for  moral  judgment  was  what 
a  man  was  in  his  heart,  not  what  he  did  or  failed  to 
do,  but  what  in  his  heart  he  would  do, — the  clean  heart 
rather  than  the  washed  hand,  the  right  spirit  rather 
than  the  right  conduct. 

The  logic  of  this,  Jesus  carries  out  with  character- 
Mt.  20:1-16  istic  thorouglincss.  In  the  parable  of  the 
unemployed,  the  workmen  who  went  into  the  vineyard 
at  the  eleventh  hour  received  the  same  pay  as  those 
who  had  been  at  work  all  day.  This  might  perhaps 
be  adduced  as  good  authority  for  the  principle  of  the 
standard  minimum  wage,  but  the  real  point  of  the  story 
is  that  the  men  were  paid  for  the  work  they  would 
have  done  if  they  had  it  to  do.  Their  willingness  to 
work  was  counted  as  work.  ''Why  stand  ye  here  all 
the  day  idle?     Because  no  man  hath  hired  us."     The 

48 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

moral  once  more  is  that  the  ultimate  moral  judgment 
is  passed  on  the  spirit  rather  than  on  the  achievement. 
This  is  the  essential  meaning  of  what  is  called  Justi- 
fication by  Faith.  Justification  means  being  declared 
to  be  right  with  God,  and  therefore  being  treated  by 
God  as  actually  being  right  with  him.  But  this  follows 
upon  the  act  of  faith,  which  is  (to  add  another  defini- 
tion, this  time  Dr.  W.  P.  du  Bose's)  *'the  disposition 
of  our  entire  selves  Godward.''  We  are  set  right  with 
God  not  by  the  tale  of  our  performances  but  by  a 
right  disposition  towards  Him.  The  same  principle 
is  laid  down  by  Jesus  from  another  angle  in  another 
— one  of  the  most  beautiful — of  his  sayings:  "He 
Mt.  10:41  that  receiveth  a  prophet  in  the  name  of  a 
prophet  shall  receive  a  prophet's  reward;  and  he  that 
receiveth  a  righteous  man  in  the  name  of  a  righteous 
man  shall  receive  a  righteous  man's  reward."  To 
receive  a  prophet  or  a  good  man  in  the  name  of  a 
prophet  or  a  good  man  is  to  receive  him  simply  be- 
cause he  is  a  prophet  or  a  good  man  and  for  no  other 
reason.  The  man  who  does  that  does  a  very  revealing 
thing.  He  shows  the  company  he  likes  to  keep,  the 
store  which  he  sets  upon  goodness,  the  thing  that  is 
in  his  heart,  what  he  himself  would  be.  He  may  lack 
the  prophet's  vision  and  his  flaming  utterance,  yet  if 
he  give  bed  and  board  to  a  prophet  just  because  he 
is  a  prophet,  then  he  is  accounted  as  belonging  to  that 
same  company.     He  classifies  himself,  and  God  ac- 

49 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

cepts  the  classification.  ''  'Tis  not  what  man  Does 
that  exalts  him,  but  what  man  Would  do,"  says  Brown- 
ing in  Saul;  and  more  fully  in  Rabbi  Ben  Ezra, — 

Not  on  the  vulgar  mass 
Called  "work,"  must  sentence  pass. 
Things  done,  that  took  the  eye  and  had  the 
price ; 
O'er  which,   from  level  stand, 
The  low  world  laid  its  hand, 
Found  straightway  to  its  mind,  could  value 
in  a  trice: 

But  all,  the  world's  coarse  thumb 

And  finger  failed  to  plumb. 
So  passed  in  making  up  the  main  account; 

All  instincts  immature. 

All  purposes  unsure. 
That  weighed  not  as  his  work,  yet  swelled 
the  man's  amount: 

Thoughts  hardly  to  be  packed 
Into  a  narrow  act. 
Fancies   that   broke   through   language   and 
escaped ; 
All  I  could  never  be. 
All,  men  ignored  in  me. 
This,  I  was  worth  to  God,  whose  wheel  the 
pitcher  shaped. 

SO 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

And  on  this  showing  our  very  failures  become,  as 
the  same  poet  says,  "the  triumph's  evidence  for  the 
fullness  of  days/' 


"Work  not  for  the  meat  which  perisheth,  but  for 
the  meat  which  abideth  unto  eternal  life/' 

A  little  hymn  once  popular  at  evangelistic  meetings 
used  to  tell  us  that 

Doing  is  a  deadly  thing. 
Doing  ends  in  death; 

and  the  refrain  went  on: 

Cast  thy  deadly  doing  down, 
Down  at  Jesus'  feet; 
Stand  in  Him,  in  Him  alone, 
Gloriously  complete. 

The  hymn  speaks  a  theological  idiom  which  is  now 
dead ;  yet  its  purpose  was  to  warn  us  against  the  fallacy 
that  salvation  was  a  matter  of  performance.  The 
hymn  no  longer  appeals  to  us,  not  alone  because  its 
theology  is  obsolete  but  because  we  cannot  understand 
the  contempt  for  "doing"  that  it  expresses.  This  is  a 
generation  which  has  spent  itself  in  doing.  We  have 
enthroned  the  deed  and  the  act.  "The  higher  man  of 
to-day,"  said  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  some  years  ago,  "is 

51 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

not  worrying  about  his  sins.  His  business  is  to  be 
up  and  doing."  This  is  the  modern  doctrine  of  right- 
eousness. The  busier  a  man  is,  the  hoHer  he  is.  The 
more  he  does,  the  more  righteous  he  becomes.  In- 
dustry and  efficiency  have  become  the  hall-marks  of 
holiness. 

It  would  take  us  too  far  afield  to  inquire  how  this 
has  come  about.  It  has  to  do  with  our  particular  type 
of  civilisation,  and  especially  with  our  modern  doctrine 
of  business.  The  modern  world  has  been  deeply  im- 
mersed in  the  exploitation  of  its  natural  resources  and 
by  reason  of  the  great  development  of  mechanical  in- 
vention has  done  this  to  an  extent  and  on  a  scale 
hitherto  unknown.  Its  entire  aim  and  its  main  inter- 
est have  been  in  the  direction  of  energy  to  production. 
The  result  is  that  business  has  gained  an  unquestioned 
ascendancy  over  life.  And  we  have  developed  a  doc- 
trine of  the  sanctity  of  work  of  which  it  would  be 
difficult  to  find  a  trace  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus. 

Work  is  simply  human  activity  directed  to  the  busi- 
ness of  sustaining  life;  and  commerce  is  at  bottom 
simply  an  organisation  of  the  processes  whereby  so- 
ciety is  provided  with  food,  clothing,  shelter,  heat  and 
light.  That  is  tO'  say  Labor  and  Commerce  have  to 
do  with  the  material  or  ''economic"  aspect  of  life.  The 
modern  trouble  is  that  the  economic  interest  is  en- 
throned over  life;  nations  are  even  governed  in  the 
interest  of  their  commerce.  But  commerce  was 
made  for  man  and  not  man  for  commerce.     Nor  was 

52 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

it  made  for  man  in  the  sense  of  being  an  opportunity 
for  self -aggrandisement,  for  making  money.  It  was 
ordained  to  be  a  cooperation  in  the  service  of  life.  But 
to-day  it  is  on  the  throne.  The  man  is  lost  in  the 
merchant  or  in  the  merchandise.  Yet  the  relation  of 
the  economic  end  of  life  to  the  rest  of  life  is  no  more 
than  the  relation  of  the  kitchen  to  the  rest  of  the 
home.  It  is  essential,  necessary,  yet  strictly  subordinate. 
We  reach  the  real  business  of  life  when  we  are 
through  with  the  business  of  making  and  eating  bread. 
This  does  not  imply  contempt  of  the  kitchen.  Properly 
understood,  the  kitchen  is  holy  ground,  full  (as  Brother 
Lawrence  found  it)  of  intimations  of  God.  But  our 
trouble  is  that  we  live  in  the  kitchen  all  the  time. 
We  never  get  away  from  it.  The  clatter  of  dishes 
follows  us  into  our  sleep.  It  is  business,  business,  with- 
out remission.  And  then  the  kitchen  ceases  to  be  holy 
ground;  for  what  holiness  it  has  derives  from  the 
service  it  was  meant  to  render  to  the  rest  of  life.  Its 
concern  is  for  the  physical  frame-work  of  life;  it  i^ 
therefore  an  integral  part  of  the  scheme  of  life.  But 
it  becomes  a  thieves'  kitchen  when  it  sets  up  to  be  the 
whole  of  life  or  asserts  an  ascendancy  over  the  rest 
of  life.  Money  and  merchandise  are  holy  things  when 
they  minister  to  life:  they  are  wholly  evil  things  when 
they  become  masters  of  life. 

The  modern  demand  for  a  shorter  working  day 
springs  from  a  root  far  deeper  than  a  mere  disinclina- 
tion to  work.     It  is  a  genuine  even  if  ill-expressed 

53 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

craving  for  time  to  live,  an  endeavor  to  set  work  in 
a  truer  relation  to  the  business  of  life  as  a  whole.  It 
is  a  revolt  from  the  doctrine  that  man  lives  for  pro- 
duction first.  And  while  it  is  true  that  Jesus  would 
not  sympathise  with  the  tone  in  which  the  demand  for 
a  shorter  working  day  is  made,  or  with  the  method  by 
which  it  is  sometimes  proposed  to  secure  it,  it  is  no 
less  true  that  he  would  sympathise  with  the  essence 
of  the  demand.  One  may  even  deduce  from  his  de- 
joim  10-12  scription  of  the  ''hireling"  that  he  would 
Mt. 20:1-16  consider  the  wage-system  demoralising; 
and  from  the  Parable  of  the  Unemployed  that  he  did 
not  believe  in  payment  by  time  or  by  piece-work.  But 
while  we  hear  from  Jesus  no  echo  of  the  old  Hebrew 
idea  that  work  was  a  curse,  neither  do  we  hear  any- 
thing about  the  "dignity"  or  the  "sanctity"  of  labor. 
Jesus  seems  to  take  work,  as  he  takes  many  other 
things,  for  granted,  simply  as  a  part  of  the  day's  busi- 
ness; and  if  we  may  judge  from  the  story  of  Mary  and 
Martha,  a  part  of  the  day's  business  to  be  got  over  as 
soon  as  possible.  There  were  other  things  of  more 
moment  to  attend  to. 

Concerning  these  other  things  it  will  be  enough 
for  our  immediate  purpose  to  note  that  they  were  not 
commodities  for  the  market.  They  were  rather  things 
in  which  life  expressed  itself  because  it  must,  without 
thought  for  their  use  or  their  value.  Nor  did  they 
consist  in  that  "charity"  to  which  our  vestigial  social 
sense  bids  us  turn  when  we  desist  awhile  from  the 

54 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

production  of  wealth.  Indeed  for  such  "charity"  as 
this  Jesus  had  Httle  use, — a  pity  defiled  by  pride,  a 
compassion  muddied  by  contempt.  And  to  our  test 
of  value, — What  is  the  use  of  it?  or,  Does  it  pay? — 
Jesus  was  an  entire  stranger.  His  test  was  ''What  is 
it  the  expression  of?"  and  whatever  it  was,  if  it  was 
the  expression  of  a  beautiful  thought  or  of  a  loving 
heart,  it  was  worth  doing  for  its  own  sake,  without 
any  after-thought.  When  the  woman  poured  her  "ex- 
Mt.  26:6-13  ceeding  precious  ointment"  on  Jesus  in  the 
house  of  Simon  the  leper,  the  disciples  were  scandal- 
ised by  the  waste.  The  ointment,  they  said,  might 
be  sold  for  much  and  given  to  the  poor.  But  Jesus 
turns  their  indignation  aside  with  a  gentle  humorous 
word,  intending  them  to  understand  that  the  woman 
had  done  a  deed  of  love  which  had  its  virtue  in  itself. 
She  had  done  a  beautiful  thing  which  was  worth  doing 
for  what  it  was.  There  is  room  for  beauty  as  well 
as  for  use  in  life.    Jesus  at  least  was  no  utilitarian. 

William  Morris,  pleading  for  the  redemption  of 
modern  industry  from  the  dullness  and  the  squalor 
which  degrades  it,  said  that  men  should  be  set  to  mak- 
ing things  which  would  be  ''a  joy  to  the  maker  and 
the  user";  and  the  saying  is  fully  in  line  with  the 
thought  of  Jesus.  There  are  two  kinds  of  work  to  be 
done  in  the  world,  the  work  we  do  because  we  must 
if  we  are  to  go  on  living,  and  the  work  we  do,  as  Rud- 
yard  Kipling  says,  "for  the  joy  of  the  working."  For 
a  few  people, — the  artist,  the  preacher,  the  doctor, — 

55 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  two  kinds  of  work  may  happily  coincide.  But 
tliere  are  few  indeed  nowadays  who  work  "for  the 
joy  of  the  working."  The  monotony  of  the  highly 
specialised  machine  industry  cannot  make  for  joy,  and 
the  general  conditions  of  industry  are  notoriously  joy- 
less. The  problem  involved  in  all  this  is  less  easy  of 
solution  than  it  would  have  been  in  Jesus'  day.  Then 
the  social  organisation  was  relatively  simple :  but  this 
is  what  Mr.  Graham  Wallas  would  call  the  day  of  the 
"Great  Society"  in  which  the  organisation  is  both 
vaster  and  more  complex.  And  it  would  appear,  if  we 
are  to  reach  what  it  is  fair  to  infer  would  be  Jesus' 
view  of  the  matter,  that  all  men  should  be  required  as 
a  matter  of  course  to  take  their  share  in  the  necessary 
toil  of  society,  in  the  production  and  the  distribution 
of  vital  necessities  and  in  the  removal  of  waste,  and 
then  under  such  conditions  of  production  for  use  (not 
for  profit)  men  would  be  able  and  have  time  to  turn 
also  to  those  activities  in  which  they  would  find  their 
peculiar  joy,  to  their  vocations,  the  things  they  do  be- 
cause they  delight  to  do  them,  in  which  they  express 
themselves  and  are  therefore  creative. 

But  we  shall  look  in  vain  for  such  an  order  of  life 
so  long  as  we  consent  to  the  view  that  wealth  is  the 
measure  of  life.  While  we  continue  to  believe  that 
a  man's  life  consists  in  the  number  of  the  things  he 
possesses  and  that  a  nation's  prosperity  is  to  be 
measured  by  its  invested  capital  and  its  rates  of  in- 
terest, we  shall  not  live  in  any  real  sense.     W^e  sliall 

S6 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

go  on  sacrificing  the  whole  to  the  part,  the  best  of  life 
to  the  least  thing  in  life.  For  this  there  is  no  remedy 
except  that  the  material  values  shall  be  expelled  from 
men's  hearts  by  the  coming  of  that  inward  kingdom 
Rom.  14:17  of  God  which  is,  as  St.  Paul  says,  "not 
eating  and  drinking  but  righteousness  and  peace  and 
joy  in  the  Holy  Ghost." 


*'The  Sabbath  was  made  for  maUj  and  not  man  for 
the  Sabbath/' 

Life  first, — this  then  was  the  view  of  Jesus.  We 
may  take  it  that  he  regarded  life  as  an  integral  thing, 
continuous  and  indivisible,  reaching  its  supreme  em- 
bodiment in  man,  who  in  his  turn  perfectly  realises 
himself  in  that  way  of  life  that  Jesus  calls  the  king- 
dom of  heaven.  But  man  has  an  inveterate  tendency 
to  subordinate  life  to  institutions;  and  one  of  the  chief 
elements  in  Jesus'  teaching  and  action  was  his  con- 
sistent protest  against  this  reversal  of  values.  Men 
for  instance  rated  the  sanctity  of  the  Sabbath  above 
human  need;  and  in  the  face  of  this  perversity  Jesus 
laid  down  a  principle  with  applications  far  wider  than 
the  specific  case  which  evoked  it.  'The  Sabbath  was 
made  for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  Sabbath." 

Jesus  has  been  called  the  greatest  of  the  humanists; 
by  which  is  meant  that  he  is  the  greatest  of  those  who 

57 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

in  all  the  ages  have  affirmed  the  sovereignty  of  the 
essential  man  over  institutions  and  systems.  The  his- 
tory of  humanism  has  yet  to  be  written;  but  when  it 
is  written  it  will  be  a  great  story.  It  will  tell  us  for 
instance  of  that  great  humanist  Daniel  who  proclaimed 
the  doom  of  those  brute  imperialisms  of  the  ancient 
world  that  crushed  manhood  and  subordinated  it  to 
their  own  purposes.  It  will  recall  the  humanists  in 
the  period  before  the  Reformation  who  protested 
against  the  subjection  of  the  human  reason  to  the  arid 
doctrinal  system  and  method  of  the  mediaeval  School- 
men. Lately  the  word  emerged — for  a  moment — as  a 
philosophical  protest  against  the  exaltation  of  reason, 
(which  is  but  one  among  the  faculties  with  which 
men  are  endowed),  in  the  accepted  philosophies  of  the 
time.  The  note  that  is  common  to  humanism  in  what- 
ever age  we  encounter  it  is  that  it  emphasizes  the  in- 
tegrity and  sovereignty  of  human  personality  and 
protests  against  its  subordination  to  either  a  part  of 
itself  or  to  anything  that  it  has  itself  made,  against  the 
rule  of  the  institution,  whether  it  be  church  or  state, 
a  creed  or  a  law  or  a  custom.  The  gospel  of  the 
humanist  is  the  application  of  the  principle  which 
Jesus  laid  down  with  reference  to  the  Sabbath  to  every 
institution,  religious  or  political,  to  evei*y  system,  ethi- 
cal, economic  or  intellectual,  to  every  movement  or 
organization  in  the  whole  world :  Life  first. 

We,  in  our  time,  have  heard  and  are  hearing  a  good 
deal  about  the  rights  of  property.     But  Jesus  would 

58 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

have  said  that  property  had  no  more  precedence  than 
the  Sabbath  over  humanity.  But  the  popular  doc- 
trine of  property  rights  gives  to  them  a  sacrosanctity 
and  an  absoluteness  which  is  alleged  to  render  them 
immune  from  interference  by  any  authority.  But 
the  doctrine  of  the  sanctity  of  property  does  not  de- 
rive from  Sinai,  still  less  from  eternity.  It  is  indeed 
a  comparatively  modern  doctrine.  But  one  might 
reasonably  gather  from  certain  recent  discussions  that 
the  doctrine  of  property-rights  was  the  divinely  ap- 
pointed rock  of  the  social  order,  and  that  it  is  our 
great  and  sacred  business  to  conserve  it  at  all  costs. 
"The  value  of  our  investments,"  said  Mr.  Roger 
Babson,  in  his  Report  (January,  1920)  ''depends  not 
upon  the  strength  of  our  banks  as  upon  the  strength 
of  our  churches.  .  .  .  The  religion  of  the  community 
is  the  bulwark  of  our  investments."  Religion  should 
of  course  make  men  peaceable  and  honest:  it  should 
produce  communities  in  which  the  decencies  and  liber- 
ties of  life  are  respected.  But  it  is  a  novel  and  start- 
ling doctrine  that  religion,  the  life  of  the  soul,  should 
be  encouraged  because  it  secures  investments.  The 
one  incident  in  the  Gospels  which  appears  to  have 
a  bearing  upon  the  subject  is  the  story  of  the  young 
Mt.  19:21  man  who  was  advised  to  sell  out  his  invest- 
ments and  to  give  the  proceeds  to  the  poor.  The 
business  of  religion  is  not  to  secure  a  man's  invest- 
ments, but  to  secure  the  man  himself,  and  if  necessary 
to  secure  him  against  his  investments.    At  any  rate  it 

59 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

is  not  much  of  a  religion  that  a  man  has  if  the  security 
of  his  investments  keeps  him  awake  o'  nights. 

This,  however,  does  not  mean  that  Jesus  would  con- 
demn property  in  itself.  It  appears  to  be  essential  to 
a  man's  freedom  and  growth  that  he  should  own,  that 
is,  have  absolute  control  over  a  certain  number  of 
things.  But  a  point  comes  when  possession  becomes 
an  obsession  and  riches  an  encumbrance.  The  care 
of  them  involves  an  expenditure  of  life,  and  what 
was  meant  to  minister  to  life  imposes  a  toll  upon  life. 
That  which  should  be  a  source  of  freedom  becomes  a 
fetter,  and  the  fear  of  loss  becomes  a  tyrannous  and 
wasteful  torture.  That  is  why  Jesus  speaks  so  doubt- 
fully of  the  rich  man's  chances  of  the  kingdom  of 
heaven. 

But  to-day  the  evil  of  property  does  not  lie  in  its 
excess  alone.  To  this  must  be  added  certain  other  con- 
siderations. We  have  already  referred  to  the  view  that 
is  held  by  some  people  that  property  is  in  some  sort  to 
be  regarded  as  a  sanctity  the  maintenance  of  which  is 
a  kind  of  charge  upon  religion.  But  in  addition  to 
this  is  the  fact  that  to-day  property  is  chiefly  held  in 
the  form  of  invested  capital,  and  from  this  there  re- 
sults two  grave  conditions.  The  first  is  that  it  invests 
the  property-owner  with  a  certain  power  over  the 
life  and  labor  of  other  men.  Capital  means,  when 
the  matter  is  reduced  to  its  lowest  terms,  the  owner- 
ship of  tools ;  and  it  is  plain  that  as,  especially  in  these 
days  of  large-scale  machine  production,  the  ownership 

60 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

of  the  tools  is  possible  only  where  there  are  large  ag- 
gregations of  wealth,  capital  and  they  who  hold  it  are 
in  a  position  of  advantage  over  those  who  have  noth- 
ing of  their  own  save  the  labor  of  which  they  are 
capable.  Property  as  capital  does  invest  the  possessor 
with  an  undoubted  power  and  authority  over  other  men ; 
and  as  it  is  a  commonplace  that  wealth  is  largely  con- 
centrated in  comparatively  few  hands  there  has  been 
evolved  in  our  days  a  sort  of  informal  economic  oli- 
garchy the  power  of  which  has  not  yet  been  regulated 
consistently  with  the  democratic  ideal.  Moreover,  the 
practice  of  investment  in  companies  and  corporations 
has  extended  the  distribution  of  capital  to  a  large 
number  of  people,  who  have  as  a  rule  no  sense  of  re- 
sponsibility for  the  undertaking  in  which  they  are 
sharers,  and  who  are  content  to  receive  their  dividends 
without  acknowledging  any  personal  obligation  to 
acquaint  themselves  with  the  processes  and  conditions 
which  produce  those  dividends.  Property  is  disbur- 
dened of  responsibility. 

But  further,  property  has  come  to  be  in  our  time  the 
principle  of  social  classification.  We  are  divided  be- 
tween the  Haves  and  the  Have-nots;  and  though  it 
would  be  impossible  to  draw  a  hard  and  fast  frontier- 
line  between  the  two  classes,  there  can  be  no  doubt  of 
the  general  character  of  the  stratification.  And  quite 
apart  from  the  fact  that  this  implies  that  the  labors  of 
the  one  class  are  largely  subordinated  to  the  main- 
tenance and  enrichment  of  the  other,  property  has  be- 

6i 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

come  the  main  occasion  of  the  social  schism  of  our  time 
and  the  chief  obstacle  in  the  way  of  that  solidarity 
which  we  shall  presently  see  was  so  essential  an  aim 
in  the  mind  of  Jesus. 

In  a  word,  property  has  gained  an  unquestionable 
ascendancy  over  life.  The  true  position  has  been  re- 
versed. For  property,  after  all,  was  made  for  man 
and  not  man  for  property. 

In  Jesus'  day,  however,  the  institution  of  property 
raised  none  of  the  acute  problems  that  it  raises  today. 
But  there  were  other  institutions  that  raised  problems 
of  their  own.  The  political  order  under  which  the  Jew 
lived  was  an  alien  thing  imposed  from  without,  and 
he  only  respected  it  under  the  compulsion  of  fear.  He 
longed  and  was  continually  planning  for  its  overthrow. 
For  the  Pharisee  the  problem  was  not  so  simple  as  it 
was  for  the  ordinary  Jew.  The  Pharisee  was  con- 
cerned for  another  institution,  the  religious  institution ; 
and  his  problem  was  that  of  threading  a  way  between 
his  hatred  for  the  Roman  and  his  desire  for  the  over- 
throw of  the  empire  on  the  one  hand  and  his  fear 
for  the  church  on  the  other.  Hitherto  the  Romans 
had  taken  up  an  attitude  of  toleration  toward  the  reli- 
gious institution;  but  they  were  ruthless  masters  when 
they  were  thwarted.  An  unsuccessful  revolt  counte- 
nanced by  the  religious  leaders  might  lead  to  rough 
handling  of  the  church.  So  that  the  question  which 
Mt.  22:17-21  the  Pharisccs  once  propounded  to  Jesus 
was  a  familiar  one  to  themselves.     They  had  often 

62 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

asked  themselves  whether  it  was  right  to  pay  taxes  to 
their  heathen  lords;  and  they  had  answered  that  it 
was  expedient  to  pay  the  taxes  in  the  interests  of  a 
quiet  life.  But  they  did  not  expect  that  Jesus  would 
take  up  so  compromised  a  position,  for  they  did  not 
imagine  that  he  being  a  Jew  would  love  the  Roman  any 
more  than  they  did;  and  moreover  he  had  no  special 
interests  to  consider. 

Jesus,  however,  looked  at  the  matter  from  an  un- 
expected angle.  He  asked  for  a  piece  of  current  coin, 
and  when  some  person  in  the  company  produced  a 
Roman  denarius  from  the  folds  of  his  garment,  Jesus 
asked  whose  imprint  it  bore.  The  answer  was  of  course 
inevitable.  Very  well  then,  says  Jesus  in  effect,  the 
position  is  that  if  you  accept  Caesar's  currency  with 
its  symbols  of  Caesar's  authority,  you  should  pay 
Caesar  what  you  thereby  acknowledge  to  be  his  due. 
But  you  should  also  give  to  God  what  you  acknowl- 
edge is  due  to  God.  This  placed  the  Pharisees  in  a 
dilemma;  for  they  no  doubt  believed  that  the  emanci- 
pation of  the  Chosen  People  of  God  from  an  alien 
thraldom  was  a  religious  duty.  In  fact,  Jesus  simply 
restated  their  own  problem  to  them  and  convicted  them 
of  compromise.  But  in  stating  the  matter  as  he  did 
Jesus  was  laying  down  a  principle  which  is  of  uni- 
versal application.  They  that  acknowledge  Caesar 
have  a  duty  to  Caesar,  but  one's  duty  to  Caesar  is  not 
necessarily  one's  duty  to  God.  This  is  the  distinction 
well  expressed  in  Lowell's  lines, 

63 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Better  rot  beneath  the  sod, 

Than  be  true  to  Church  and  State, 

While  we  are  doubly  false  to  God. 

In  recent  times,  the  state,  which  is  the  community 
organised  for  the  purposes  of  government,  has  come 
to  be  regarded  as  a  divine  institution  possessing  an 
inexpugnable  right  to  dispose  of  the  persons  of  its  in- 
dividual members,  and  "Give  to  Caesar  what  is 
Caesar's'*  is  quoted  in  support  of  the  doctrine.  We 
cannot  here  undertake  a  discussion  of  the  nature  and 
the  authority  of  the  state :  nor  are  we  interested  at  the 
moment  in  anything  but  what  Jesus  would  probably 
have  said  to  the  modern  claim  of  the  state.  Once 
more  we  can  safely  infer  his  attitude.  The  state,  he 
would  say,  exists  for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  state. 
The  state  was  made  not  in  order  to  lord  it  over  life 
but  to  serve  the  ends  of  life;  and  its  title  to  respect 
and  obedience  rests  upon  the  adequacy  with  which  it 
Bom.  13:1-4  fulfils  this  officc.  St.  Paul  tells  us  that  the 
civil  magistrate  holds  his  commission  from  God;  but 
he  was  a  Roman  citizen  and  for  the  most  part  he 
found  the  Empire  a  help  rather  than  a  hindrance. 
Moreover,  in  those  days  the  Empire  practised  a  sort 
of  religious  toleration, — the  era  of  Cresar-worship 
had  not  yet  fully  arrived.  But  the  writer  of  the  Book 
of  Revelation  did  not  share  Paul's  respect  for  the  state. 
Bev.i7:6  To  him  it  was  the  ''scarlet  woman"  who 
was  ''drunken  with  the  blood  of  the  saints  and  the 

64 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

blood  of  the  martyrs  of  Jesus."  It  is  sometimes  said 
that  it  is  the  business  of  government  to  preserve  order, 
— yet  it  is  only  so  to  preserve  order  as  to  give  the 
largest  margin  of  freedom  for  the  expression  of  life. 
And  that  is  the  test  by  which  its  title  to  the  respect 
of  its  members  stands  or  falls. 

It  does  not  appear  that  Jesus  found  the  Roman  gov- 
ernment much  in  his  way.  Certainly  he  does  not  say 
so.  Yet  it  cannot  be  doubted  that  it  represented  to 
him  an  order  which  must  pass  away,  one,  so  to  speak, 
of  the  old  wine-skins.  But  he  did  not  see  it  passing 
away  by  the  method  which  some  of  his  countrymen 
favored.  Indeed,  he  foresaw  that  to  fight  the  Romans 
with  their  own  weapons  meant  destruction  and  death. 
Mt.  26:52  ^'He  that  takes  the  sword  shall  perish  by 
the  sword."  He  saw  that  the  logic  of  his  country- 
men's policy  would  lead  to  what  it  ultimately  did  lead, 
the  destruction  of  Jerusalem  and  the  final  extinction 
of  what  remained  of  the  Jewish  state.  It  was  for  this 
iuke  19:42  reason  that  he  wept  over  the  city  that  did 
not  *'know  the  things  that  belonged  to  its  peace."  And 
in  that  moment  when  the  Jews  rejected  Jesus  and 
chose  Barabbas,  the  rebel  leader  who  for  "insurrection" 
luke  23:25  had  been  cast  into  prison,  they  made  their 
final  and  fatal  choice.  The  attempt  to  overthrow  politi- 
cal institutions  by  violence  seemed  to  him  to  be  tragic 
folly. 

Mt.  9:16-17  Jesus  was  tender  to  old  garments  and 
old  wine-skins.    He  would  not  have  a  worse  rent  made 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

in  the  old  garment  by  patching  it  with  a  piece  of  un- 
dressed cloth;  nor  would  he  have  the  old  wine-skins 
perish  by  putting  new  wine  into  them.  He  would  leave 
them  alone  in  their  decay;  time  would  do  the  rest.  It 
was  his  business  to  quicken  a  new  life  which  would 
flow  outside  the  old  channels,  leaving  the  old  chan- 
nels to  dry  up  and  crumble  away.  The  new  life  was 
to  function  outside  the  old  institutions,  and  the  old 
institutions,  having  no  function  left,  would  by  and 
by  perish  of  atrophy.  Yet  while  it  was  wasteful  to 
put  the  new  wine  in  the  old  wine-skins,  it  was  equally 
wasteful  to  have  no  wine-skins  at  all.  The  new  life 
must  have  its  own  organ,  its  own  channel.  So  when 
Jesus  abandoned  his  hope  of  carrying  out  his  mission 
through  the  existing  religious  institutions,  he  formed 
a  new  society  in  wHich  the  new  life  could  function  in- 
dependently of  both  the  political  and  the  ecclesiastical 
systems.  As  a  matter  of  history,  the  original  society 
of  twelve  grew,  in  spite  of  opposition  and  persecution, 
until  it  became  necessary  for  the  empire  to  come  to 
terms  with  it.  But  the  agreement  which  the  church 
made  with  the  empire  was  a  capital  blunder  from  which 
it  has  never  recovered.  It  was  of  course  a  departure 
from  the  plan  of  Jesus.  The  new  life  was  mated  with 
the  old  way  of  the  world,  and  the  church  was  untrue 
to  its  own  genius  when  it  made  its  compromise  with 
Constantine  (about  A.  D.  325).  True,  the  new  life 
must  have  degenerated  a  good  deal  before  it  could  even 
consider  such  a  compromise :  yet  sufficient  virtue  still 

66 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

remained  in  it  to  make  it  the  most  considerable  fact 
in  the  world  at  the  time. 

It  would,  however,  be  a  mistake  to  suppose  that 
Jesus  was  indifferent  to  politics, — that  is,  to  politics  in 
its  larger  sense  of  the  organisation  and  economy  of  the 
common  life.  And  it  would  be  another  mistake  to  sup- 
pose that  Christianity  has  nothing  to  do  with  politics. 
The  growth  of  the  modern  democratic  ideal  may  not 
have  originated  with  Jesus,  but  it  has  undoubtedly  re- 
ceived its  most  powerful  endorsement  from  Jesus'  doc- 
trine of  the  infinite  and  therefore  equal  value  of  every 
living  soul.  For  democracy  ideally  enthrones  the  es- 
sential man,  not  a  particular  man,  or  a  particular  group 
of  men.  But  it  does  not  follow  that  we  have  achieved 
democracy  when  we  have  established  a  universal  fran- 
chise, representative  government  and  majority  rule. 
In  practice  such  a  form  of  government  may  be  as  a 
recent  writer  has  said,  "government  of  the  people  by 
the  prosperous  for  the  prosperous,"  *  which,  whatever 
else  it  may  be,  is  certainly  not  democracy.  Democracy 
is,  after  all,  something  more  than  a  political  form.  It 
must  cover  the  whole  of  life.  Its  logic  must,  for  in- 
stance, be  carried  through  into  the  economic  region. 
But  even  then  democracy  cannot  live  except  it  be  sus- 
tained by  whatever  is  contained  in  the  saying  that  we 
are  members  one  of  another,  and  in  the  acceptance  and 
practice  of  its  law  of  mutual  service.  It  is  not  a  politi- 
cal doctrine  so  much  as  a  way  of  life.  But  the  final 
"*  Metropolitan,  Editorial,  August,  1920. 

^7 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

test  of  a  political  system,  whether  it  be  called  demo- 
cratic or  by  whatever  other  name,  is  whether  it  min- 
isters to  the  freedom  and  abundance  of  life.  And 
it  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  government  in  the  world 
that  could  stand  this  test.  The  best  we  can  say  is  that 
some  are  not  so  bad  as  others. 

5 

''Ye  leave  the  commandment  of  God,  and  hold  fast 
the  tradition  of  men  .  .  .  making  the  word  of  God 
void  by  your  tradition/' 

It  was  chiefly  in  the  religious  sphere  that  Jesus  found 
the  institution  most  securely  enthroned  over  the  life 
that  it  was  intended  to  serve. 

We  have  already  observed  that  Jesus  originally  de- 
signed to  usher  in  the  new  order  of  life  on  the  crest  of 
a  religious  revival  within  the  existing  religious  insti- 
tutions. But  his  synagogue  ministry  met  with  con- 
siderable opposition  which  after  a  time  came  to  a 
climax  over  the  healing  of  the  man  with  the  withered 
hand  on  the  sabbath  day.  The  scribes  and  Pharisees 
»  ^  ^  ,,  were  ''filled  with  madness."  And  Jesus 
Mark  3:5  looked  upou  them  with  anger,  ''being 
grieved  at  the  hardening  of  their  heart."  He  saw  that 
it  was  an  impossible  situation;  and  on  that  day  he  left 
the  synagogue  never  (except  upon  one  doubtful  occa- 
sion) to  enter  it  any  more.  Henceforth  his  work 
would  lie  outside  and  the  next  stage  of  his  ministry 

68 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

was  chiefly  spent  in  laying  down  the  foundations  of 
the  new  society  in  and  through  which  the  new  life  was 
to  function  and  grow  into  that  single  order  of  life 
which  would  supersede  both  the  state  and  the  church 
that  then  were. 

The  trouble  that  had  overtaken  the  ecclesiastical  sys- 
tem of  the  Jews  is  recurrent  in  the  history  of  religious 
institutions, — the  hardening  of  religious  life  into  a 
rigid  system  of  belief  and  conduct.  Jewish  religion 
gathered  around  the  Law,  and  the  observance  of  the 
Law  was  the  whole  duty  of  man.  But  unless  the  mean- 
ing of  law  is  kept  steadily  in  mind,  fidelity  in  the  ob- 
servance of  it  may  become  an  arrest  of  life.  Law  is  of 
course  the  endeavour  to  define  right  conduct,  but  it  is 
never  more  than  a  definition  of  the  minimum  of  moral 
obligation.  Yet  our  tendency  is  to  regard  it  as  stating 
the  total  of  human  obligation,  and  whatever  is  beyond 
law  is  a  work  of  supererogation,  a  work  of  extra  merit, 
so  to  speak;  and  whatever  the  law  does  not  forbid 
comes  to  be  counted  as  permissible.  It  was  therefore 
possible  to  observe  the  letter  of  the  law  and  yet  be 
guilty  of  gross  breaches  of  its  spirit.  It  was  with  this 
that  Jesus  charged  the  Pharisees  and  the  scribes:  "Ye 
Mt.  23:23  tithe  mint  and  anise  and  cummin,  and  have 
left  undone  the  weightier  matters  of  the  law,  judgment, 
and  mercy  and  faith."  It  was  out  of  this  temper  that 
the  controversy  about  the  sabbath  grew.  The  current 
Mt.  12:11-12  legalism  exalted  the  sabbath  over  human 
need.    Whereupon  Jesus  answered  them:  "What  man 

69 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

shall  there  be  of  you  that  shall  have  one  sheep,  and  if 
this  fall  into  a  pit  on  the  sabbath  day,  will  he  not  lay 
hold  on  it,  and  lift  it  out?  How  much  more  then  is  a 
man  of  more  value  than  a  sheep?  Wherefore  it  is  law- 
ful to  do  good  on  the  sabbath  day." 

We  can  see,  therefore,  why  Jesus  said  to  his  dis- 
Mt.  5:20  ciples :  "Except  your  righteousness  shall  ex- 
ceed the  righteousness  of  the  scribes  and  the  Phari- 
sees, ye  shall  in  no  wise  enter  into  the  kingdom  of 
heaven."  Jesus  had  no  quarrel  with  the  law,  only  with 
the  official  interpretation  of  it.  He  declared  that  he 
had  indeed  come  to  fulfil  the  Law.  For  the  Law  was 
good  so  far  as  it  went.  But  no  law  will  ever  succeed 
in  being  so  extensive  and  so  detailed  that  it  can  cover  all 
the  contingencies  that  arise  in  life.  Jesus,  with  his 
consistent  emphasis  upon  the  inward,  showed  how  the 
spirit  of  the  Law  as  it  was  expressed  in  certain  com- 
mandments went  far  beyond  the  scope  of  the  com- 
mandments. This  is  what  he  does  in  the  Fifth  Chap- 
ter of  Matthew.  He  takes  one  after  another  of  the 
specific  legal  injunctions  with  which  his  hearers  were 
familiar  and  shows  how  the  spirit  that  was  embodied  in 
the  injunction  went  out  far  beyond  the  injunction. 
Mt.5:27  The  spirit  which  forbade  the  adulterous 
thought  forbade  the  adulterous  act.  The  spirit  which 
imposed  a  limit  upon  revenge  led  logically  to  a  for- 
bidding of  retaliation,  and  carried  to  its  natural  con- 
clusion, required  that  the  injured  person  should  seek 
to  reconcile  the  offender  by  rendering  him  service  along 

70 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  very  line  of  his  offence.  "Whosoever  shall  compel 
Mt.  5:38-41  thee  to  go  with  him  one  mile'* — that  is,  it 
a  Roman  officer  commandeers  you  to  carry  his  baggage 
for  a  mile, — "go  with  him  twain.'* 

Right  conduct  is  the  expression  of  a  right  spirit. 
And  if  one  has  this  spirit,  says  Jesus,  there  is  no 
limit  that  can  be  assigned  to  his  well-doing.  In  such 
conduct  there  is  a  creative  quality.  By  being  true  to 
itself  through  everything,  it  is  forever  outdoing  its 
own  best.  And  the  final  objection  to  legalism — this 
insistence  upon  the  letter  of  the  law — is  that  it  kills 
the  original  and  creative  quality  in  goodness.  It  re- 
duces goodness  to  a  rule.  Both  to  the  good  and  the 
evil  it  says,  Thus  far  shalt  thou  go.  And  it  looks 
with  equal  hostility  both  upon  him  who  transgresses 
the  law  and  upon  him  who  transcends  it. 

With  dogma  as  we  know  it,  Jesus  was  not  apparently 
troubled.  But  that  was  because  the  Jew  had  not  been 
a  thinker  like  the  Greek.  It  is  true  that  he  had  exer- 
cised a  good  deal  of  ingenuity  in  the  interpretation  and 
application  of  the  Law;  and  a  great  body  of  legal  lore 
had  grown  in  the  course  of  the  years.  And  to  this  sup- 
plementary matter  the  scribe  and  the  Pharisee  attached 
as  much  importance  as  to  the  Law  itself.  It  was  to  this 
accretion  to  the  text  of  the  Law  that  Jesus  was  allud- 
ing when  he  spoke  of  "the  tradition  of  men";  and  the 
attitude  to  it  was  in  its  own  sphere  precisely  that  which 
in  the  region  of  religious  truth  we  call  dogmatism.    The 

71 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

result  of  both  is  the  same.  And  indeed  the  objection 
to  both  is  the  same.  It  is  that  they  ascribe  a  quahty  of 
absoluteness  and  finality  to  a  definition  of  something 
that  cannot  from  the  nature  of  the  case  be  fully  defined, 
and  least  of  all  can  be  finally  defined.  A  definition, 
whether  it  be  a  doctrine,  a  creed,  what  you  will,  is  not 
in  itself  objectionable.  It  may,  properly  used,  be  a 
fruitful  instrument  for  the  guiding  and  the  unfolding 
of  the  religious  life.  When  it  is  regarded  as  a  point 
to  set  out  from  and  not  to  stop  at,  a  starting  place 
and  not  a  terminal,  then  it  has  its  uses.  But  we  tend 
to  regard  it  as  final,  as  a  line  which  every  man  must 
toe.  But  religious  experience  cannot  be  captured  into 
a  phrase  and  held  within  a  doctrinal  system :  it  is  con- 
tinually outstripping  the  definition.  When  it  does  not 
do  so,  it  is  either  stagnant  or  shrinking.  If  it  is  a 
growing  thing,  it  ''breaks  through  language  and  es- 
capes."   As  Coventry  Patmore  has  said: 

"In  divinity  and  love 
What's  best  worth  saying  can't  be  said." 

The  living  truth  is  always  greater  than  anything  that 
we  can  say  about  it.  Dogma  is  a  fingerpost  which  in- 
dicates the  way  in  which  religious  experience  is  travel- 
ling ;  but  it  becomes  a  prison  for  the  soul  and  an  arrest 
of  life  when  it  is  assumed  to  be  the  final  truth  of  things. 


7» 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 
6 

"Thy  kingdom  come  on  earth  .  .  .  as  in  heaven" 

Let  it  not  be  supposed  that  because  Jesus  emphasised 
the  kingdom  within  that  he  despised  the  world  without 
and  that  he  was  in  any  sense  separating  himself  from 
it.  One  may  live  outside  the  conventional  institutions 
without  forsaking  the  world  of  men,  as  Jesus  did. 
What  the  vision  of  the  kingdom  does  for  us  is  to  give 
us  a  revaluation  of  the  world.  Take  money,  for 
instance.  The  modern  world  has  loved  money  without 
respecting  it.  Money  is  a  symbol  of  value ;  and  value 
is  created  by  the  expenditure  of  the  priceless  stuff  of 
life.  A  coin  is  so  much  minted  life,  a  holy  thing,  not 
to  be  handled  lightly  or  irreverently.  It  is  a  sacramental 
thing,  like  the  bread  and  wine  of  the  Communion,  the 
outward  and  visible  sign  of  life  fruitfully  expended. 
That  is  why  a  bank  should  be  as  a  temple  and  the 
banker  a  priest,  a  man  who  handles  holy  things.  The 
storekeeper's  merchandise  is  sacramental  stuff,  con- 
gealed life.  His  store  should  be  a  temple,  and  the  man 
who  sells  shoddy  goods  defiles  the  temple  as  much  as 
did  the  hucksters  and  moneychangers  in  the  Temple  in 
Jerusalem  long  ago.  To  the  man  in  whom  the  King- 
dom has  come,  the  world  and  all  that's  in  it  is  sacra- 
mental. Not  only  does  he  find  "sermons  in  stones  and 
books  in  the  running  brooks,"  not  only  does  he  see 
"every  common  bush  aflame  with  God,"  but  he  will  go 

73 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

to  the  commonest  affair  of  daily  business  as  to  an  act 
of  worship;  he  will  go  to  the  marketplace  as  to  the 
Holiest  of  All,  he  will  tread  every  familiar  spot  with 
unshod  feet,  and  he  will  look  in  the  deep  of  men's  eyes 
and  see  God  there. 

Nor  will  this  be  all.  With  it  will  go  a  new  percep- 
tion of  the  possibilities  of  the  world.  William  Blake 
is  most  widely  known  through  the  stanza  in  which  he 
says: 

I  will  not  cease   from  mental  strife, 
Nor  shall  my  sword  rust  in  my  hand, 

Till  we  have  built  Jerusalem 

In  England's  green  and  pleasant  land. 

That  same  passion  of  creation  and  redemption  comes 
to  every  man  who  has  seen  the  kingdom  of  God.  Mr. 
G.  K.  Chesterton  says  somewhere  that  if  we  want  to 
save  Pimlico,  we  must  hate  Pimlico  and  love  Pimlico 
at  the  same  time — hate  it  for  the  ugliness  that  it  is, 
love  it  for  the  loveliness  that  it  may  be.  And  ever 
beneath  the  crust  of  ugliness  there  is  a  hidden  beauty 
waiting  to  be  revealed.  St.  Paul  speaks  of  the  crea- 
tion waiting  for  the  revealing  of  the  sons  of  God, 
waiting  to  be  delivered  from  the  bondage  of  corrup- 
tion into  what  the  sons  of  God  see  that  it  may  be. 
The  redeeming  of  the  world  halts  because  we  do  not 
see  it  with  the  eyes  of  the  sons  of  God;  the  passion 
for  souls  is  dead  within  us  because  we  do  not  see  in 
the  faces  of  the  sons  of  men  the  face  of  the  Son  of 

74 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Man.  But  this  will  be  no  longer  so  when  we  have 
gained  that  inner  illumination  which  enables  us  to  see 
through  the  husk  to  the  kernel,  through  the  outward  to 
the  inward,  through  the  flesh  to  the  spirit.  We  shall 
discover  in  the  men  round  about  us  that  imperishable 
image  of  God,  which,  broken  and  defiled  though  it  be, 
is  yet  the  loveliest  thing  on  earth  to  him  who  has  the 
eyes  to  see  it.  Then  will  come  a  great  tide  of  com- 
passion and  longing  for  the  gathering  in,  the  mending, 
and  the  cleansing  of  this  broken  and  disordered  beauty, 
that  thrill  of  love  which  gives  us  no  peace  until  we 
become  the  bondsmen  of  God  for  the  redeeming  of  this 
world  of  man.  We  shall  know  something  of  the  great 
passion  which  Frederic  Myers  has  rightly  read  into  St. 
Paul: 

Only  as  souls  I  see  the  folk  thereunder, 

Bound  who  should  conquer,  slaves  who  should  be 
kings, 
Hearing  their  one  hope  with  an  empty  wonder, 

Sadly  contented  with  a  show  of  things.  .  .  . 

Then  with  a  thrill  the  intolerable  craving 
Shivers  through  me  like  a  trumpet  call, — 

O  to  save  these,  to  perish  for  their  saving, 
Die  for  their  life,  be  offered  for  them  all! 

7 

"A  certain  woman  lifted  up  her  voice  and  said  unto 
him:  Blessed  is  the  womb  that  hare  thee,  and  the 

7S 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

breasts  which  thou  didst  suck!  But  he  said:  Yea 
rather,  blessed  are  they  that  hear  the  word  of  God  and 
keep  it,'' 

Jesus'  relations  with  his  family  were  apparently 
somewhat  difficult.  They  did  not  understand  him 
Mark  3:21  and  even  went  so  far  as  to  doubt  his  sanity. 
But  it  would  be  to  go  beyond  the  facts  to  say  that  there 
was  any  resentment  in  Jesus'  attitude  to  them.  What 
had  happened  was  that  Jesus  had  entered  upon  a  new 
kind  of  relation  that  transcended  the  old.  The  relation 
of  physical  kinship  was  superseded  by  one  of  spiritual 
Mt.  12:49-50  kinship.  "He  stretched  forth  his  hands 
toward  his  disciples  and  said,  Behold  my  mother  and 
my  brethren!  For  whosoever  shall  do  the  will  of  my 
Father  which  is  in  heaven,  he  is  my  brother  and  sister 
and  mother." 

Upon  the  priority  of  the  new  relation  in  the  king- 
dom Jesus  was  emphatic.  The  man  who  wanted  to  go 
Mt.8:22  home  to  bury  his  father  was  told  to  "let 
the  dead  bury  the  dead;  but  go  thou  and  preach  the 
Luke  9:62  kingdom."  And  the  other  man  who  de- 
sired to  "bid  farewell  to  them  that  are  at  home  in  my 
house"  was  told  that  "no  man  having  put  his  hand  to 
the  plough  and  looking  back  is  fit  for  the  kingdom  of 
God."  The  saying:  "If  any  man  cometh  unto  me  and 
hateth  not  his  own  father  and  mother  and  wife  and 
children  and  brethren  and  sisters  and  his  own  life  also, 
he  cannot  be  my  disciple,"  is  not  so  harsh  as  it  sounds. 

76 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

The  word  hate  renders  an  Aramaic  word  which  is  rela- 
tive. If  A  loves  B  better  than  he  loves  C  he  may  be 
said  in  Aramaic  to  hate  C.  Jesus  is  not  asking  that 
men  should  discard  their  kinsfolk,  but  he  quite  definite- 
ly claims  for  himself  and  for  the  kingdom  a  priority 
over  them. 

There  is  of  course  nothing  very  shocking  in  this. 
We  agree  that  a  man's  nation  under  certain  conditions 
comes  before  his  family,  and  Jesus  is  only  insisting  that 
there  are  relations  between  men  higher  than  those  of 
the  home.  Indeed,  all  relationships  that  have  a  purely 
physical  basis, — family,  nation,  locality,  race, — he  re- 
gards as  inferior  and  less  authoritative  than  the  new 
relation  established  between  them  *'that  hear  the  word 
of  God  and  keep  it."  The  bonds  of  the  kingdom  take 
precedence  over  all  other  bonds  whatsoever.  Jesus  was 
creating  a  new  family  on  the  basis  of  a  spiritual  kin- 
ship which  rendered  all  other  kinships  secondary. 

We  shall  see  later  how  large  a  part  the  sense  of 
human  solidarity  played  in  the  mind  of  Jesus.  The 
physical  solidarity  of  the  race  is  already  a  fact;  but 
just  because  it  was  physical — and  only  physical — it 
was  disrupted  in  all  sorts  of  ways.  Family  feuds, 
tribal  wars,  national  disputes, — the  world  has  been 
always  full  of  these  things,  although  God  had,  as  St. 
Paul  said,  "made  of  one  blood  all  nations  of  men.'* 
Men  tend  to  group  themselves  in  small  units,  based 
upon  proximity  of  physical  relation,  and  to  assert  their 
group-consciousness  against  each  other.     And  all  the 

77 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

promise  that  was  implied  in  the  physical  solidarity  of 
man  was  being  frustrated  by  spiritual  disintegration 
and  moral  disharmony.  But  in  the  kingdom  of  God, 
a  spiritual  and  moral  content  was  to  be  added  to  this 
solidarity.  It  was  to  be  transformed  from  a  physical 
to  a  spiritual  and  moral  fact.  The  local  and  sectional 
affections  and  affinities  of  men  were  to  be  enlarged  into 
a  relation  which  would  be  generous  enough  to  embrace 
all  men.  The  family,  the  tribe,  the  nation, — all  were 
to  be  displaced  by  the  kingdom  of  God;  and  within 
the  kingdom  men  would  stand  in  a  relation  to  one 
another  deeper,  more  intimate,  more  exacting  than  any 
other  human  relation  could  be. 

But  it  does  not  at  all  follow  that  the  new  relation 
abrogates  the  old  ones.  On  the  contrary,  Jesus  cared 
for  his  mother  to  the  end.  The  apparently  harsh  word 
that  he  spoke  to  her  at  the  Cana  marriage  is  behind  the 
translation  only  a  mode  of  speech  and  implies  no  feel- 
ing of  any  kind.  He  had  a  thought  for  his  mother  in 
his  deepest  anguish.  The  truth  is  that  we  do  not  know 
the  possibilities  of  our  human  affection  until  they  are 
baptised  into  the  kingdom.  None  of  us  love  each  other 
as  we  might  until  we  love  the  kingdom  of  God  more. 
And  there  is  no  friendship  like  that  of  those  who  are 
first  friends  of  Jesus.  It  is  a  matter  of  realisation  once 
more.  We  do  not  realise  the  wealth  and  the  beauty 
of  our  human  affections  until  they  have  been  brought 
within  the  kingdom  of  God. 

"Lord,"  said  Peter  one  day,  "we  have  left  all  and 

.  78 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

followed  thee.  What  shall  we  therefore  have?"  Jesus' 
Mt.  19:29  answer  was,  ''Every  one  that  hath  left 
houses  or  brethren  or  sisters  or  fathers  or  mother  or 
children  or  lands  for  my  name's  sake  shall  receive  a 
hundredfold  and  inherit  eternal  life."  Which  means 
that  the  relations  of  men  within  the  kingdom  are  a 
sort  of  communism  of  affection,  and  seemingly  also  of 
goods.  Here  we  are  all  each  other's  fathers  and 
mothers  and  children;  and  we  are  free  of  each  other's 
homes  and  lands.  It  is  significant  that  the  disciples, 
when  they  faced  the  business  of  life  after  Jesus  had 
left  them,  should  have  had  "all  things  in  common" ; 
and  that  periods  of  spiritual  quickening  have  been  ac- 
companied by  communistic  experiments.  But  it  springs 
from  the  new  sense  of  unity  and  togetherness  which  is 
born  of  a  vision,  however  faint,  of  the  kingdom ;  and 
the  communism  of  goods  is  an  attempt  to  give  a  sacra- 
mental expression  to  the  communism  of  affection.  It 
is  well  to  remeinber  that  the  kingdom  of  God  is  a 
world-wide  communism  of  the  spirit;  and  when  we 
have  reached  that  point  we  shall  discover  that  we  have 
also  a  communism  of  everything  else. 

We  observe  here  what  we  shall  have  occasion  to 
observe  again  that  Jesus  identifies  a  relation  to  him- 
self as  identical  with  a  relation  to  the  kingdom.  What 
this  implies  for  our  understanding  of  Jesus  himself  we 
shall  have  to  consider  at  a  later  point.  But  it  is  prob- 
able that  Jesus  was  partly  acting  upon  the  feeling  that 
he  was  dealing  with  people  for  whom  the  idea  of  the 

79 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

kingdom  was  too  abstract  and  inapprehensible,  and  for 
whom  it  had  to  be  translated  into  terms  of  a  personal 
relation.  Jesus  looked  upon  himself  as  the  sacra- 
ment of  the  kingdom,  and  his  "Come  unto  me"  was  a 
simplified  and  more  concrete  form  of  an  invitation  to 
enter  the  kingdom  of  God.  He  was  dealing  with 
minds  for  whom  truth  had  to  be  ''embodied  in  a  tale" 
and  the  spirit  conveyed  through  a  symbol.  And  he 
himself  was  the  symbol  of  the  kingdom.  But  this 
suggests  something  more.  In  outward  expression  and 
practice,  the  kingdom  is  an  affair  of  personal  rela- 
tionships. And  our  relations  to  each  other  are  to  be 
fashioned  upon  our  fundamental  relationship  to  Jesus. 
Mt.  25:40  ''Inasmuch  as  ye  have  done  it  unto  the 
least  of  these  ye  have  done  it  unto  me."  We  are  to 
treat  each  other  as  we  would  treat  Jesus.  We  are 
far  from  perceiving  that  the  entire  problem  of 
the  common  life  is  a  matter  of  personal  relations. 
What  we  call  the  social  problem  is  all  involved  in  the 
problem  between  you  and  me.  Everything  begins 
there.  I  had  some  years  ago  to  pay  occasional  visits 
to  a  home  in  which  all  the  members  were  of  a  some- 
what bitter  and  critical  habit  of  speech  and  usually 
they  exercised  this  temper  upon  each  other.  But  there 
was  one  thing  upon  which  they  were  all  agreed, — thcv 
all  hated  the  people  next  door.  And  so  it  is  that  our 
personal  dislikes  are  enlarged  into  group  antagonisms 
and  our  group  antagonisms  sharpen  into  all  kinds 
of  conflict  and  war.     And  over  against  this  disruptive 

80 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

temper  Jesus  calls  for  a  new  type  and  quality  of  mutual 
relation  between  men.  But  this  new  relation  is  not 
something  one  may  put  on  at  will  as  one  might  put  on 
a  different  garment.  It  is  something  that  comes  of 
itself  when  men  have  seen  the  true  good  of  life  in  a 
vision  of  the  kingdom.  Not  that  it  comes  at  once  in 
all  its  perfection.  It  has  to  grow  by  practice  and  ex- 
pression; and  it  has  a  stiff  fight  against  our  residual 
self-love.  But  it  is  the  natural  first  fruits  of  the  king- 
dom in  a  man's  life,  as  it  is  also  the  only  hope  of  the 
world. 


8i 


CHAPTER  FOUR 

RIGHT  AND  WRONG 

(Matt.  5:14-15;  18:21-35;  21:33-44;  25:21-46;  Luke 
10:25-37;  12:13-15;  13:1-5;  15:11-32;  22:24-27) 


"The  stone  which  the  builders  rejected,  the  same 
was  made  head  of  the  corner  .  .  .  and  he  that  falleth 
upon  this  stone  shall  he  broken  to  pieces;  but  on  whom- 
soever it  shall  fall  it  shall  scatter  him  as  dust." 

THE  man  who  first  saw  that  "honesty  is  the  best 
poHcy"  had  made  a  great  discovery.  He  had 
not  merely  formulated  a  safe  maxim  of  con- 
duct; he  had  discovered  that  he  lived  in  a  moral  uni- 
verse, a  universe  so  made  that  it  does  not  pay  to  be 
dishonest  in  it.  No  doubt  the  man  had  had  his  fingers 
burned  in  a  piece  of  crooked  business,  but  that  takes 
nothing  away  from  the  greatness  of  his  discovery.  It 
is  also  true  that  he  had  not  found  out  all  there  was  to 
be  found  out  about  the  moral  basis  of  the  universe. 
Still  it  was  a  considerable  thing  to  have  found  that  it 
had  a  moral  character  at  all. 

82 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

In  a  sense,  mankind  has  been  making  that  same 
discovery  all  through  its  history.  Human  nature  is  so 
constituted  that  its  growth  and  happiness  depend  upon 
its  acting  in  a  certain  way,  and  in  the  course  of  the 
ages  men  have  discovered  some  of  the  things  that  con- 
stitute that  way.  The  discovery  has  been  made  in 
the  business  of  living  and  through  the  experience  of 
living  together.  Men  saw  that  if  they  were  to  make 
the  best  of  themselves  and  of  each  other,  there  were 
certain  things  that  they  had  to  agree  to  do,  and  other 
things  that  they  had  to  agree  to  abstain  from  doing. 
These  were  their  mores,  which  is  the  Latin  word  for 
customs.  And  these  mores  were  in  the  course  of  time 
collected  and  systematised  in  codes  of  law,  like  those  of 
Hammurabi  and  Moses.  It  was,  however,  evident  that 
these  mores  were  not  all  on  the  same  footing  of  au- 
thority and  importance,  and  little  by  little  men  saw  that 
among  the  mass  of  mores  there  was  a  small  core 
which  carried  with  it  an  authority  of  a  different  quality 
from  the  rest.  It  had  a  seemingly  absolute  and  uni- 
versal character,  and  the  word  mores  came  to  be  asso- 
ciated with  this  body  of  absolute  and  uncontingent  obli- 
gations. So  that  when  we  speak  of  morality  it  is  of 
these  obligations  that  we  are  thinking  as  contrasted 
with  those  things  that  are  merely  customary  and  per- 
missive. 

Now  it  is  perfectly  true  that  amid  the  complexities 
of  human  life  men  may  differ  in  their  view  of  the  appli- 
cation of  these  obligations  to  particular  cases,  and  the 

83 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

borderline  between  right  and  wrong  is  apt  to  be  blurred. 
Yet,  however  men  may  differ  about  the  rightness  or 
wrongness  of  particular  acts,  the  faculty  which  distin- 
guishes between  the  quality  of  rightness  and  the  quality 
of  wrongness  is  a  universal  thing.  This  is  something 
original,  inherent,  instinctive  in  human  nature.  It  may 
be  crude  and  may  want  much  education.  But  it  is  there, 
a  something  within  us,  which  speaks  in  the  imperative 
mood  with  an  accent  not  our  own. 

Rightly  or  wrongly  men  have  supposed  this  to  be 
the  voice  of  God  within  them.  Even  though  those 
people  be  right  who  hold  that  conscience  is  a  product  of 
evolution,  it  does  not  necessarily  follow  that  it  is  any 
less  the  voice  of  God  on  that  account.  However  we 
came  by  it,  we  have  learnt  from  experience  that  it  is  the 
reflection  within  us  of  the  moral  order  of  the  universe 
of  which  we  are  part.  And  the  religious  interpreta- 
tion of  this  moral  order  and  of  its  counterpart  within 
the  soul  is  that  it  is  an  expression  of  the  moral  nature 
of  God. 

Now,  whatever  view  we  may  take  of  the  person  of 
Jesus,  we  may  at  least  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  he  lived 
in  so  great  an  intimacy  with  God,  and  therefore  pre- 
sumably in  so  close  moral  harmony  with  God,  that 
whatever  he  has  to  say  upon  this  particular  subject 
is  entitled  to  be  heard  with  respect.  And,  indeed,  there 
are  few  people  who  would  dispute  that  what  he  was 
even  more  than  what  he  said  furnishes  us  with  the 
surest  clue  to  the  moral  order  of  the  universe.     The 

84 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

plain  inference  from  the  passage  which  introduces  this 
section  is  that  he  regarded  himself  as  an  embodiment 
of  the  moral  order:  and  this  claim  which  would  be 
presumptuous  in  another  has  been  seriously  challenged 
by  few;  and  those  few  are  people  like  Nietzsche,  who 
deny  the  truth  and  the  validity  of  the  whole  Christian 
view  of  the  world.  But  if  one  accepts,  as  most  people 
do,  the  kind  of  thing  that  Jesus  stands  for  as  true  and 
valid  for  life  in  this  world,  then  it  is  not  to  be  denied 
that  he  is  the  best  embodiment  of  his  own  precept  and 
therefore  of  the  moral  order  as  a  whole.  In  point  of 
fact,  the  moral  nature  of  Jesus  is — whether  willingly 
or  unwillingly — endorsed  by  the  conscience  of  the 
average  man. 

But  the  tragedy  of  the  world  is  that  while  men  have 
paid  lip-service  to  the  way  of  Jesus,  they  have  not 
taken  that  way  themselves;  and  all  through  their  his- 
tory they  have  paid  the  price  of  their  default.  For 
Gal  6-7  there  is  in  the  universe  not  only  a  moral 

Hei).2:2  order  but  a  principle  of  continuity  which 

secures  that  a  man  shall  reap  what  he  sows,  that  every 
transgression  and  disobedience  shall  receive  due  recom- 
pense of  reward.  The  punishment  of  sin  is  inherent  in 
the  sin  itself  as  the  harvest  is  in  the  seed.  It  carries 
the  certainty  of  its  own  nemesis  in  itself.  Men  have 
ignored  the  moral  order  and  have  gone  their  own  way, 
and  the  moral  order  has  gone  its  way  and  crushed  them. 

It  is  of  some  consequence  therefore  that  we  should 
seek  out  the  mind  of  Jesus  upon  this  matter  of  the 

8s 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

moral  order,  and  of  what  is  fundamental  to  it — namely 
upon  what  principle  Jesus  distinguished  between  right 
and  wrong.  If  we  can  discover  this  we  shall  find 
out  the  moral  basis  upon  which  Hfe  rests  and  by  their 
attitude  to  which  men  and  nations  rise  and  fall. 


''For  if  ye  forgive  not  men  their  trespasses  neither 
mill  your  Father  forgive  you  your  trespasses/' 

Mt.7:i2  **A11  things  therefore  whatsoever  ye  would 
that  men  should  do  unto  you,  even  so  do  ye  also  unto 
them."  This  saying  we  call  the  Golden  Rule  and  in  a 
somewhat  uncritical  way  we  call  it  the  whole  duty  of 
man.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  is  nothing  of  the  sort 
and  Jesus  did  not  mean  it  to  be  taken  as  the  ultimate 
principle  of  conduct.  Indeed,  how  could  he?  For  it 
raises  moral  obligation  no  higher  than  the  plane  of  our 
own  desires.  Taken  in  a  generous  sense,  it  is  a  good 
rough  rule  of  conduct  for  the  man  in  the  street.  Observe 
what  Jesus  says  concerning  it, — ''for  this  is  the  law 
and  the  prophets."  That  is  to  say,  it  represents  the 
highest  point  yet  reached  in  ethical  perception.  And 
Jesus  lays  down  another  rule  which  goes  beyond  it, — 
not  "Do  unto  others  as  ye  would  that  they  should  do 
to  you,"  but  "Do  unto  others  as  God  has  done  unto 
you."  God  is  our  pattern;  we  are,  as  St.  Paul  says  (in 
Eph.  5:1      Moffatt's     translation),     to     "copy     God." 

86 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Jesus  tells  us  to  love  our  enemies  and  to  do  good  to 
Mt.  5:44-45  them  that  despitef ully  use  us  "that  ye  may 
be  the  children  of  your  Father,"  who  loves  men  in  this 
undiscriminating  v^ay.  St.  Paul  sees  this  and  lays  it 
Bph.4:32  down  categorically,  "Be  kind  to  one  an- 
other, tender-hearted,  forgiving  one  another  as  God 
in  Christ  hath  forgiven  you/'  So  also  St.  John,  "// 
ijoim4-ii  ^^^  ^^  loved  us  we  also  ought  to  love  one 
Mt,  5:48  another/'    And  it  was  Jesus  who  laid  down 

the  principle  that  the  heavenly  Father's  perfection  was 
to  be  the  goal  of  ours. 

What  then  does  Jesus  tell  us  about  the  moral  nature 
of  God?  The  saying  "God  is  love"  does  not  come  to 
us  from  Jesus,  but  it  easily  might  have  done  so.  For 
in  no  other  terms  can  we  define  the  impression  that 
Jesus  gives  us  of  the  Father.  But  at  this  point  it  may 
be  as  well  to  deal  with  a  misconception  about  this  mat- 
ter which  is  quite  common,  namely  that  when  we  speak 
of  the  moral  nature  of  God  we  have  to  speak  of  his 
holiness  as  well  as  of  his  love,  as  though  they  were  in 
some  sense  different  and  even  antithetical  qualities. 

The  word  holiness  is  used  relative  to  man  as  well 
as  to  God;  and  every  religion  has  its  doctrine  of  per- 
sonal holiness.  Originally  the  word  was  used  in  a 
ritual  sense,  to  denote  things  and  persons  set  apart  to 
the  service  of  God.  But  with  the  growing  recognition 
of  the  unity  and  the  moral  character  of  God  the  word 
acquired  an  ethical  content;  and  in  a  rough  generalisa- 

87 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tion  the  doctrine  of  holiness  is  that  it  consists  in  the 
acquisition  by  the  behever  of  the  moral  character  of 
his  deity.  But  when  it  is  used  of  the  Christian  God 
it  is  to  signify  an  aspect  of  his  character  which  cannot 
presumably  be  included  in  the  term  ''love."  Popularly, 
holiness  is  regarded  as  covering  the  ''righteousness,"  the 
"justice,"  of  God,  and  is  generally  associated  with  the 
stern  and  austere  attributes  of  the  Deity.  But  this  is 
both  to  misconceive  the  meaning  and  activity  of  love, 
and  to  accept  traditional  ideas  without  sufficient  analy- 
sis. God  is  love,  and  love  only ;  and  when  we  say  that 
God  is  holy,  we  mean  that  his  love  is  perfect,  absolute, 
invariable,  true  to  itself  through  everything.  We  mean 
that  God  will  never  go  back  upon  Himself.  It  is  not 
that  He  is  "justice"  as  well  as  "love,"  if  we  use  the 
word  justice  in  the  popular  sense.  Indeed,  it  would  be 
difficult  to  associate  popular  justice  with  a  God  who 
visits  the  sins  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children  even  to 
the  third  and  fourth  generations  and  who  sends  his  rain 
on  the  just  and  the  unjust  and  makes  his  sun  to  shine 
on  the  good  and  the  evil  alike.  But  this  dualism  per- 
sists in  men's  thought  of  God  chiefly  because  they  do 
not  think  of  love  in  the  same  way  as  the  New  Testa- 
ment writers  do. 

We  may  perhaps  approach  this  subject  in  detail  by 
observing  how  much  the  mind  of  Jesus  was  engaged 
with  the  question  of  injuries  and  their  forgiveness. 
Mt  18-22  ^^  ^^^'  ^^  says,  to  "forgive  seven  times  in 
i.Tikei7'4        ^    <iay/'    ^^^    even    "unto    seventy    times 

88 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

seven."  In  teaching  his  disciples  to  pray  he  attaches  to 
Mt.  6:12  the  petition  for  forgiveness  the  words,  "as 

we  also  forgive  our  debtors."  And  in  a  sort  of  foot- 
note to  the  prayer  he  singles  out  the  point  for  special 
mention.  Only  the  forgiving  are  forgiven.  The  un- 
forgiving go  unforgiven.  It  is  an  indication  of  the 
place  that  the  subject  occupies  in  his  mind  that  this  is 
the  only  point  in  the  prayer  that  receives  this  empha- 
sis. Jesus  was  but  carrying  out  the  logic  of  his  own 
precept  when  he  said  on  the  Cross :  "Father,  forgive 
luke  23:34      them,  for  they  know  not  what  they  do." 

But  forgiveness  as  Jesus  thought  of  it  was  some- 
thing more  than  the  remitting  and  the  forgetting  of 
an  injury,  merely  letting  bygones  be  bygones.  Few 
of  us  indeed  go  even  that  distance.  In  one  of  his 
Luke  7:41  parables  Jesus  likens  sin  to  a  bad  debt  and 
the  forgiving  of  sin  to  the  writing-off  of  a  bad  debt. 
But  he  would  not  have  regarded  this  as  a  complete 
description  of  what  he  meant  by  forgiveness.  It  is 
not  merely  to  write  off  the  bad  debt  but  to  resume  busi- 
ness with  the  defaulter  on  the  old  terms.  In  a  word, 
it  is  reconciliation.  Forgiveness  is  the  healing  of  a 
broken  fellowship,  the  restoration  of  interrupted  friend- 
ship. It  is  the  re-establishment  of  right  personal  rela- 
tionships. 

But  is  one  to  forgive  without  the  offender's  repent- 
Lute  i7:3  ance?  Apparently  not.  "If  he  repent, 
thou  shalt  forgive  him."  But  there  is  after  all  some- 
thing greater  and  better  than  the  duty  of  forgiveness, 

89 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

namely  the  grace  of  forgiveness.  And  the  character- 
istic of  what  I  call  the  grace  of  forgiveness  is  that  it 
does  not  wait  for  the  offender's  repentance,  but  goes  out 
to  provoke  it.  The  greater  forgiveness  is  that  which 
anticipates  the  repentance  and  by  anticipating  it  calls 
it  forth.  Here  we  have  the  essential  meaning  of  the 
Mt.  5:39-42  **hard  sayings"  about  the  other  cheek  and 
the  second  mile.  When  one  is  struck,  one's  impulse 
is  to  retaliate,  to  pay  the  offender  back  in  his  own 
coin.  But  that  achieves  nothing  but  multiplied  bit- 
terness. It  makes  the  man  sorry  for  himself,  not  for 
his  sin.  What  we  have  to  do  is  not  to  break  the  fel- 
low's head,  but  that  tremendous  and  fundamental 
thing,  to  break  his  hem't.  It  is  what  St.  Paul  means: 
Bom.  12:20  "If  thine  enemy  hunger,  feed  him;  if  he 
thirst,  give  him  to  drink:  for  in  so  doing  thou  shalt 
heap  coals  of  fire  upon  his  head,"  or,  as  Dr.  Moffatt 
translates  it,  "thou  shalt  make  him  feel  a  burning 
sense  of  shame." 

It  is  worth  observing  here  that  this  is  what  God 
Bom.  5:8-10  docs,  according  to  St.  Paul.  "God  com- 
mendeth  his  love  toward  us  in  this  that  while  we  were 
yet  sinners  Christ  died  for  us."  ''While  we  were  yet 
enemies,  we  were  reconciled  to  God  by  the  death  of 
his  Son."  God  did  not  wait  for  our  repentance:  He 
did  all  in  His  power  to  provoke  it.  He  bore  greatly  and 
gently  with  sinners, — as  the  Psalmist  said,  "These 
Bom.  3:25  things  thou  didst  and  I  kept  silence," — 
"overlooking  the  sins  that  were  done  aforetime,"  as 

90 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

St.  Paul  says, — that  men  might  take  his  forbearance 
as  an  invitation  to  repentance.  And  as  Jesus  said,  he 
sent  them  his  servants,  the  prophets,  and  at  last  sent 
Mt.  21:33-39  thcc  His  Sou.  He  left  no  deed  of  love 
undone  that  man  might  be  moved  to  repentance. 


"If  therefore  thou  art  offering  thy  gift  at  the  altar, 
and  there  rememherest  that  thy  brother  hath  aught 
against  thee,  leave  there  thy  gift  before  the  altar  and 
go  thy  way.  First  he  reconciled  to  thy  brother,  and 
then  come  and  offer  thy  gift" 

"The  Spirit  of  Jesus,"  says  William  Blake,  ''is  con- 
tinual forgiveness  of  sins."  And  again,  he  says,  'The 
glory  of  Christianity  is  to  conquer  by  forgiveness." 
The  disciple  of  Jesus  is  called  upon  to  forgive  utterly 
and  unconditionally,  to  forgive  not  on  repentance, 
but  to  forgive  in  order  to  provoke  repentance.  But 
it  is  not  a  matter  of  forgiveness  for  its  own  sake, 
but  in  order  to  restore  a  broken  unity,  a  severed  rela- 
tion. This  is  the  point  intended  in  the  emphasis  upon 
restitution  in  the  saying  quoted  at  the  beginning  of 
this  paragraph. 

We  are  undoubtedly  here  on  the  trail  of  the  funda- 
mental principle  of  the  ethics  of  Jesus.  We  shall 
probably  best  pursue  the  matter  by  contrasting  Jesus' 
prescription  for  the  treatment  of  offenders  with  the 
popular  conception  of  justice. 

91 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

What  do  we  mean  by  "justice"?  We  can  answer 
the  question  most  satisfactorily  by  taking  one  or  two 
instances  of  the  operation  of  justice.  Two  brothers 
have  a  dispute  about  the  division  of  their  father's 
estate,  and  the  controversy  is  brought  for  settlement 
to  court.  In  that  case,  justice  requires  that  the  estate 
shall  be  divided  "equitably,"  that  is  to  say,  consistently 
with  a  due  regard  to  the  claims  and  rights  of  both 
parties.  A  worker  in  a  factory  loses  a  finger  owing 
to  some  defect  in  the  machinery.  He  sues  his  em- 
ployer for  compensation  on  account  of  the  loss.*  If 
it  can  be  proved  that  the  accident  was  due  to  the  em- 
ployer's negligence,  then  the  worker  is  conceded  to 
have  a  claim  against  the  employer  and  a  right  to  the 
compensation  which  he  claims.  A  man  steals  an- 
other man's  pocketbook,  and  he  is  proved  guilty;  he 
receives  a  punishment  which  is  supposed  to  be  in  some 
way  the  equivalent  of  the  crime. 

Justice  then  is  conceived  as  lying  in  the  equitable 
adjustment  of  conflicting  claims,  in  the  suitable  redress 
of  injury,  in  the  due  punishment  of  offences.  It  is  to 
be  observed,  first,  that  there  runs  throughout  the  whole 
administration  of  justice  the  idea  of  striking  a  balance. 
And  it  is  worth  recalling  that  the  symbolic  figure  of 
Justice  is  a  blindfolded  woman  who  holds  a  pair  of 
scales  in  her  hand.  We  sometimes  speak  in  serious- 
ness words  that  were  written  in  jest,  of  "making  the 
punishment  fit  the  crime."     We  punish  murder  with 

*  That  is,  if  there  is  a  Compensation  Law  in  operation ! 

92 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

death.  And  though  we  no  longer  say,  **An  eye  for  an 
eye,"  yet  when  a  man  loses  an  eye  through  the  offence 
or  the  negligence  of  another,  we  fix  a  money  equiva- 
lent of  the  loss  and  award  it  as  ''damages."  We  even 
find  courts  venturing  to  assess  a  cash  valuation  of  a 
broken  heart!  And  where  no  question  of  offence  or 
injury  arises  we  think  of  justice  as  a  process  of  equity, 
the  due  adjustment  of  conflicting  claims  or  rights. 

But  observe  also  that  this  all  rests  upon  a  doctrine  of 
''rights,"  rights  of  the  individual  or  of  the  group. 
And  justice  has  to  do  with  the  assertion  and  vindica- 
tion of  these  ^'rights"  in  the  event  of  any  invasion 
or  violation  of  them.  The  "rights"  of  the  worker  are 
vindicated  against  the  employer  to  whose  negligence 
was  due  the  loss  of  his  finger.  The  "rights"  of  a  lega- 
tee under  the  terms  of  a  will  are  asserted  against  a 
person  who  endeavours  to  violate  them.  The  "rights" 
of  society  are  vindicated  against  the  criminal. 

So  that  our  reception  of  Justice,  and  therefore  our 
Doctrine  of  Right, ^  start  from  a  view  of  the  integrity 
and  inviolability  of  certain  "rights."  Law  is  the  defi- 
nition and  codification  of  these  "rights,"  and  the 
processes  of  justice  have  come  into  being  because 
these  "rights"  are  liable  to  be  disregarded  or  to  be 

*  It  may  be  observed  that  in  this  discussion  the  difference 
between  Right  and  Rights  can  best  be  grasped  by  remembering 
that  the  antithesis  of  Right  is  Wrong,  while  the  antithesis  of 
Rights  is  Duties.  It  should  perhaps  be  also  pointed  out  that 
the  word  equity  is  used  here  in  its  plain  dictionary  sense  and 
not  in  the  technical  sense  that  it  has  in  law. 

93 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

in  conflict  with  one  another.  And  the  findings  of 
justice  are  enforced  by  a  machinery  of  injunctions  and 
retributive  penalties. 

Jesus  was  once  asked  to  settle  a  dispute  between  two 
Luke  12:13-15  brothers  about  a  dead  man's  estate.  The 
equities  of  the  case  had  been  badly  violated;  and  the 
rights  of  one  party  grievously  disregarded.  But  Jesus 
summarily  refused  to  have  anything  at  all  to  do  with 
the  matter.  What  he  said  about  it  was :  ''Beware  of 
covetousness."  The  Right  as  Jesus  saw  it  was  so 
little  vindicated  by  a  more  equitable  division  of  the 
property  that  he  would  not  touch  the  dispute.  It  re- 
quired something  deeper  than  adjusting  the  outward 
equities  of  the  case :  it  could  be  satisfied  with  nothing 
less  than  the  reconciliation  of  the  parties.  And  for  that 
it  was  necessary  to  remove  the  covetousness  which  was 
at  the  root  of  the  quarrel.  The  equities  would  in  that 
event  take  handsome  care  of  themselves.  But  the  covet- 
ousness stood  in  the  way,  and  however  fairly  the  estate 
might  be  divided,  the  old  self-love  would  still  remain 
in  possession. 

Jesus  was  little  concerned  with  people's  "rights,"  for 
he  saw  that  their  rights  were  forever  involving  them 
in  conflict.  His  concern  was  for  their  real  interests; 
and  these  he  believed  to  be  always  identical.  More- 
over, men  would  not  quarrel  about  them,  if  they  once 
saw  them,  nor  indeed  would  they  be  disposed  to  quar- 
rel about  anything  else.     For  these  interests  are  of  a 

94 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

kind  that  do  not  provoke  covetousness  or  conflict. 
Rather  do  they  stimulate  cooperation  and  fellowship. 
Jesus*  whole  attitude  rested  upon  the  fact  of  the  under- 
lying solidarity  of  men  and  the  consequent  continuity, 
mutuality  and  identity  of  their  essential  interests.  Here 
is  the  root  of  Jesus'  ethics.  It  derives  from  the  circum- 
stance of  human  solidarity,  and  for  him  the  principle 
that  distinguished  between  the  rightness  and  wrong- 
ness  of  conduct  was  its  bearing  upon  this  solidarity. 
Did  it  reinforce  it  or  disrupt  it?  Our  common  life  to- 
day is  ordered,  justice  is  administered,  our  whole  view 
of  human  relations  is  defined,  in  accordance  with  a 
doctrine  of  human  rights  tJmt  are  self-re  gar  ding  and 
are  therefore  potentially  always  in  conflict.  The  ulti- 
mate Right  as  Jesus  saw  it  was  based  upon  a  doctrine 
of  human  interests  that  are  always  in  fact  identical. 
The  common  view  starts  from  the  individual  as  an  in- 
dividual :  the  doctrine  of  Jesus  starts  from  a  view  of  the 
individual  as  a  social  being  whose  life  and  growth  are 
organically  bound  up  with  those  of  his  fellows.  The 
one  regards  man  as  being  social  only  in  spite  of  him- 
self, and  as  having  to  be  constrained  into  social  con- 
duct. The  other  regards  man  as  instinctively  social 
and,  when  he  is  allowed  to  be  true  to  himself,  swing- 
ing naturally  to  the  pole  of  fellowship.  It  is  likely  that 
Jesus'  contempt  for  popular  notions  of  justice  sprang 
from  the  fact  that  they  assumed  and  therefore  perpet- 
uated that  individualism  which  was  the  denial  of  the 

95 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

solidarity  upon  the  realisation  and  deepening  of  which 
all  human  good  depended.* 

For  Jesus,  right  conduct  consisted  of  those  things 
that  make  for  human  unity.  That  is  why  he  lays  so 
much  stress  upon  forgiveness  and  restitution,  and  why 
he  has  so  little  room  in  his  mind  for  doctrines  of  pun- 
ishment and  retaliation  which  perpetuate  human  dis- 
union. Right  conduct  is  that  which  creates,  fosters, 
enriches,  restores  fellowship;  wrong  conduct  is  that 
which  denies,  destroys,  hinders  fellowship.  At  last 
morality  is  the  art  of  fellowship.  The  emphasis  of  the 
gospels  is  steadily  upon  the  society-making  graces. 
They  know  no  distinction  between  ''social"  and  ''indi- 
vidual" ethics.  On  the  contrary,  they  teach  what 
we  may  call  an  "organic"  ethics,  which  identifies  social 
and  private  duty.  Even  that  peculiarly  individual  vir- 
tue of  veracity  is  urged  upon  the  Ephesian  Christians 
Epii.4:25  by  St.  Paul,  because  "we  are  members  one 
of  another."  It  is  particularly  to  the  point  that  on 
the  one  occasion  that  Jesus  gives  us  the  materials  for 
Luke  19:1-9  a  definition  of  salvation — the  conversion 
of  Zacchaeus — he  should  describe  it  as  a  social  expe- 
rience.   Zacchseus  was  made  a  member  of  a  family, — 

*  Since  the  above  was  written,  the  general  drift  of  the  argu- 
ment has  been  confirmed  in  my  mind  by  an  article  in  The  At- 
lantic Monthly  (Sept.,  1920)  by  Mr.  Louis  Bartlet  on  *'The 
Newer  Justice,"  in  which  he  points  out  how  certain  new  de- 
velopments in  the  Administration  of  Justice  (Courts  of  Do- 
mestic Relations,  Children's  Courts,  etc.)  express  a  "social" 
conception  of  justice.  Here  the  emphasis  is  upon  conciliation 
and  reclamation  in  contradistinction  to  the  "individualistic"  bias 
toward  retribution  and  penalty. 

96 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

''forasmuch  as  he  also  is  a  son  of  Abraham."  And  it 
was  so  that  Zacchseus  himself  felt  it,  for  he  imme- 
diately began  to  act  as  a  member  of  a  family  should. 
"Half  of  my  goods  I  give  to  the  poor,  and  if  I  have 
exacted  anything  wrongfully,  I  restore  it  fourfold." 
He  began  to  perform  those  social  acts  that  were  there 
and  then  within  his  power. 

We  are,  however,  not  to  suppose  that  because  Jesus 
treats  fellowship  as  the  touch-stone  of  right  and  wrong, 
that  fellowship  is  an  end  in  itself.  Fellowship  is  im- 
portant because  human  nature  is  so  made  that  it  only 
finds  itself  and  grows  in  fellowship.  Fellowship  can 
and  may  be  prostituted  to  perverse  uses.  Men  can  asso- 
ciate for  wrong  and  vicious  purposes,  just  as  there 
may  be  honour  among  thieves.  Fellowship  is  good 
only  when  it  is  devoted  to  its  own  appointed  end  of 
enriching  life  and  helps  men  to  rise  above  themselves 
to  higher  things.  Nor  is  this  exaltation  of  fellowship 
to  be  interpreted  as  meaning  that  Jesus  subordinated 
the  individual  to  the  society.  On  the  contrary,  Jesus 
was  jealous  for  the  individual,  and  his  thought  was 
for  men  rather  than  for  society;  but  he  knew  that  a 
man  could  only  find  himself  as  he  made  common  cause 
with  his  brethren  and  identified  himself  with  them. 
Indeed,  it  may  be  said  that  for  him  the  whole  duty  of 
man  consisted  in  self -identification  with  the  other  man, 
Mt.  10:39  as  it  was  also  the  path  to  self-realisation.  "He 
that  loseth  his  life  .  .  .  shall  find  it." 

97 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


''But  when  they  continued  asking  him,  he  lifted 
up  himself,  and  said  unto  them.  He  that  is  with- 
out sin  among  you,  let  him  cast  the  first  stone.  And 
again  he  stooped  down  and  with  his  finger  wrote  upon 
the  ground.  And  they,  when  they  heard  it,  went  out 
one  by  one  .  .  .  and  Jesus  was  left  alone,  and  the 
woman  where  she  was,  in  the  midst.  And  Jesus  lifted 
up  himself  and  said  unto  her.  Woman,  where  are  they? 
Did  no  man  condemn  thee?  And  she  said.  No  man. 
Lord.  And  Jesus  said.  Neither  do  I  condemn  thee; 
go  and  sin  no  more.*' 

Professor  Rauschenbusch  has  defined  love  as  "the 
energy  of  a  steadfast  will,  bent  upon  creating  fellow- 
ship/' It  is  time  that  in  the  interests  of  clear  thinking 
and  sound  speech,  some  effort  should  be  made  to  deliver 
the  word  love  from  the  slough  of  sugary  sentimentality 
— and  worse — into  which  it  has  fallen.  It  is  properly 
used  of  the  sum  of  those  attitudes  and  activities  which 
make  for  fellowship.  It  is  the  source  of  the  manifold 
energy  of  social  attraction  and  cohesion.  It  is,  more- 
over, a  power  of  redemption,  converting  enemies  into 
friends  and  expelling  the  self-love  which  destroys  the 
unity  of  mankind. 

But  Jesus  was  too  uncompromising  a  realist  to  sup- 
pose that  human  love  even  at  its  best  was  infallible  in 
its  effects.     *'With  God,'*  indeed,  "all  things  are  pos- 

98 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

sible."  But  with  men?  Generally,  he  would  say;  but 
there  are  exceptions.  There  are  men  so  entrenched  in 
their  self-love  and  their  pride  that  they  cannot  be 
Mt.  18:15-17  reached  by  any  human  good-will.  "If  thy 
brother  sin  against  thee,  go,  show  him  his  fault  be- 
tween thee  and  him  alone:  if  he  hear  thee,  thou  hast 
gained  thy  brother.  But  if  he  hear  thee  not,  take 
with  thee  one  or  two  more,  that  at  the  mouth  of  two 
witnesses  or  three  every  word  may  be  established.  And 
if  he  refuse  to  hear  them,  tell  it  unto  the  church  also, 
and  if  he  refuse  to  hear  the  church,  let  him  be  unto 
thee  as  the  gentile  and  the  publican."  *  With  such 
people  there  is  nothing  to  do  but  to  leave  them  to 
themselves — and  to  the  mercy  of  God.  The  same  idea 
Luke  13:6-9  finds  cxprcssiou  in  the  parable  of  the  Fruit- 
less Figtree,  where  it  is  made  plain  that  contumacy 
may  be  carried  to  a  point  to  which  love  is  powerless 
to  follow  it.  The  self-love  of  the  Pharisee  had  led 
him  on  the  way  to  the  unpardonable  sin,  to  the  moral 
blindness  which  calls  black  white,  f  the  sin  that  can- 
not be  repented  of.     And  Jesus  says  that  the  branch 

*  This  passage  undoubtedly  suggests  a  closer  organisation  of 
the  Christian  society  and  of  its  discipline  than  had  been  reached 
in  the  lifetime  of  Jesus.  Moreover  the  use  of  the  words  gen- 
tile and  publican  is  of  a  kind  that  falls  awkwardly  from  the 
lips  of  Jesus.  It  is  hard  to  accept  the  passage  in  its  present  form 
as  coming  directly  from  Jesus.  It  is  probably  a  later  elabo- 
ration of  the  original  saying  of  Jesus,  but  there  is  no  reason 
to  suppose  that  its  general  sense  misinterprets  the  mind  of 
Jesus. 

t  He  could  not  distinguish  between  the  Holy  Spirit  and  the 
Prince  of  Demons. 

99 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

of  the  tree  which  does  not  bear  fruit  is  cut  off.  When 
a  man  persists  in  remaining  outside  the  fellowship  or 
in  conduct  which  denies  or  despises  the  fellowship,  his 
self -exclusion  must  be  accepted  and  he  be  left  to  pay 
the  price  of  his  pride  and  self-love. 

But  such  persons  as  these  are  extreme  and  exceptional 
cases.  Men,  as  a  rule,  are  amenable  to  love,  which 
means  that  they  can  be  redeemed.  This  task  of  re- 
deeming men  from  the  anarchism  of  self-love  is  one 
of  the  primary  obligations  of  a  Christian  society.  As 
things  are,  what  we  have  for  the  moral  anarchist  is 
retribution ;  it  is  at  last  beginning  to  dawn  dimly  upon 
us  that  our  task  with  him  is  his  redemption.  The 
traditional  treatment  of  crime  secures  for  society  at 
a  given  time  a  certain  immunity  from  the  activities  of 
a  number  of  criminally  disposed  persons.  At  the  best, 
it  may  have  deterred  a  few  poor  spirits  from  criminal 
adventure.  The  one  thing  it  is  incapable  of  doing  is  to 
solve  the  moral  problem  which  crime  embodies.  For 
what  by  our  present  methods  we  do  is  either  to  harden 
the  criminal  or  to  turn  him  into  a  shuffling  parasite  by 
breaking  him.  So  far  from  solving  the  moral  prob- 
lem, we  have  only  aggravated  it. 

No  society  can  afford  to  leave  a  dangerous  criminal 
at  large.  It  must  put  him  under  restraint.  But,  having 
put  him  under  restraint,  a  Christian  society  would  not 
be  concerned  with  punishing  him  for  his  crime  so  much 
as  with  curing  him  of  his  criminality.  Indeed,  one  of 
the  first  things  that  a  really  Christian  society  would  do 

lOO 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

is  to  establish  a  new  diagnosis  of  the  social  misfit, 
whether  he  be  pauper  or  criminal.  It  would  treat  moral 
anarchy  not  as  a  danger  to  be  suppressed  so  much  as  a 
disease  to  be  cured.  And  when  the  criminal,  especially 
the  young  criminal,  is  put  in  conditions  which  en- 
courage the  growth  of  the  sense  of  social  responsibility, 
as  a  rule  he  responds  to  the  treatment.  Samuel  Butler 
was  not  far  wrong  when  he  suggested  that  a  liar  might 
be  a  case  for  a  hospital. 

Moreover,  it  is  to  a  great  extent  true  that  we  owe 
this  treatment  to  the  criminal.  When  we  realise  how 
much  crime  is  due  to  mental  deficiency  and  how  much 
mental  deficiency  in  its  turn  is  due  to  evil  social  con- 
ditions that  our  fathers  before  us  and  we  who  have 
come  after  them  have  tolerated,  we  cannot  repudiate  a 
certain  share  in  the  guilt  of  the  criminal.  While  we 
hold  that  he  is  responsible  for  his  act,  the  fact  remains 
that  we  are  to  some  extent  responsible  for  him.  And 
in  consequence,  it  becomes  our  obligation  to  redeem 
him. 

This  matter  of  social  or  collective  responsibility  car- 
ries us,  however,  a  good  deal  farther.  In  the  days 
before  the  railroad  the  moral  responsibilities  of  the 
individual  were  relatively  simple.  Those  of  the  ordi- 
nary man  hardly  crossed  the  parish  bounds.  But  the 
railroad  and  all  that  has  come  after  it  have  created  a 
social  integration  far  more  complex  and  far  more  ex- 
tended than  anything  that  our  fathers  knew.  No  man 
can  now  trace  the  moral  consequences  of  his  own  acts 

lOI 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

or  gauge  the  measure  of  his  complicity  in  wrongful 
acts,  whether  personal  or  public.  The  ramifications  of 
modern  business,  the  vast  network  of  international 
credit,  the  endless  specialisations  of  the  machine  in- 
dustry— all  this  makes  for  a  labyrinthine  tangle  of 
moral  responsibility  through  which  the  individual  can- 
not hope  to  thread  a  way.  A  man  may,  quite  inno- 
cently, buy  a  share  in  some  commercial  enterprise,  but 
he  cannot  trace  that  investment  through  all  its  adven- 
tures until  it  returns  to  him  in  the  shape  of  dividend. 
He  does  not  know  what  atrocity  it  may  have  aided  or 
abetted  in  some  distant  Putumayo,  or  in  what  cruelty  it 
may  have  cooperated  in  a  Nigerian  tin-mine.  Not  the 
most  meticulous  care  can  secure  me  from  wearing  or 
eating  something  that  has  been  produced  by  underpaid 
labour,  and  from  being  therefore  involved  in  com- 
plicity in  "sweating."  All  the  rudiments  of  this  modern 
complexity  were  present  in  the  simplest  societies  of  the 
past,  and  men  have  always  been  guilty  of  each  other's 
sins.  But  the  coming  of  what  has  been  called  the  "great 
society"  has  produced  an  extent  and  an  intensity  of  col- 
lective moral  responsibility  which  is  different  from 
anything  that  the  world  has  ever  hitherto  seen.  The 
one  thing  that  is  clearly  no  longer  possible  (even  if  it 
ever  was)  is  for  a  man  to  try  to  "cut  out"  of  this 
welter  and  save  his  own  soul.  He  cannot  so  lightly 
escape  the  vast  common  collective  guilt.  Never  was  it 
so  plain  that  if  we  would  be  saved,  we  must  be  saved 
together.     Personal  salvation  and  social  salvation  be- 

I02 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

long  indissolubly  to  one  another.  It  will  be  character- 
istic of  a  Christian  society  that  it  will  not  leave  the 
great  tasks  of  forgiveness  and  restitution  to  its  indi- 
vidual members.  It  will  express  its  own  soul  in  great 
collective  acts  of  atonement.  This  will  serve  to  show 
how  far  a  cry  it  is  even  at  this  late  day  to  anything 
that  might  be  called  a  Christian  society. 

5 

"There  were  some  present  .  .  .  who  told  him  of 
the  Galilee ans,  whose  blood  Pilate  had  mingled  with 
their  sacrifices.  And  he  answered  and  said  unto  them, 
Think  ye  that  these  Galilceans  were  sinners  above 
all  the  Galilceans,  because  they  have  suffered  these 
things?  .  .  .  Or  those  eighteen,  upon  whom  the  tower 
in  Siloam  fell,  and  killed  them,  think  ye  that  they  were 
offenders  above  all  the  men  that  dwell  in  Jerusalem? 
I  tell  you.  Nay;  but  except  ye  repent,  ye  shall  all  like- 
wise perish.'^ 

It  was  said  on  a  previous  page  that  justice  in  our 
sense  and  use  of  the  word  could  hardly  be  attributed 
to  a  God  who  treats  the  good  and  the  evil  alike,  and  who 
visits  the  sins  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children.  The 
consequences  of  sin  appear  for  the  most  part  to  fall 
elsewhere  than  where  the  guilt  lies.  The  children  who 
suffered  in  the  European  War  were  paying  the  price 
of  the  sins  and  the  negligences  of  their  elders.  And 
whatever  may  be  said  about  the  moral  order  in  which 

103 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

this  kind  of  thing  may  happen,  it  can  hardly  be  de- 
scribed as  just,  if  we  interpret  justice  in  the  traditional 
sense. 

There  are  large  and  baffling  questions  in  this  region 
which  in  the  present  state  of  our  knowledge  admit  of 
no  quite  wholly  satisfactory  answer.  But  when  we 
think  of  these  things  it  is  well  to  remember  one  or  two 
general  facts.  We  have  already  seen  that  there  is  a 
principle  of  moral  continuity  in  the  worfd  which  binds 
our  deeds  to  their  fruits  with  an  infrangible  certainty. 
We  have  also  insisted  upon  the  fact  of  human  solidari- 
ty, the  circumstance  that  we  are  bound  to  one  another 
by  a  thousand  indissoluble  ties.  No  man  lives  to 
himself  alone.  The  thing  he  is  and  the  thing  he 
does  affects  the  whole  of  life.  We  are — ^as  it  were — 
ganglia  in  a  nervous  system  as  wide  as  the  world  and 
as  enduring  as  time.  But  both  these  principles  of 
solidarity  and  continuity  are  in  themselves  morally 
colorless.  They  belong  to  the  economy  of  the  uni- 
verse, like  the  law  of  gravitation,  and  tell  us  nothing  of 
the  moral  nature  of  God.  And  each  is  capable  of  bad 
use  and  good.  They  secure  that  evil  will  work  out  its 
own  consequences  to  the  end;  but  equally  do  they 
secure  the  same  kind  of  march  and  circulation  for  the 
good.  The  order  that  provides  that  we  suffer  for  the 
evil  deeds  of  others  provides  no  less  that  we  shall  profit 
by  their  good  deeds.  It  does  not  compromise  the  love 
of   God   that  men   in  the   exercise   of   their   freedom 

104 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

should  choose  to  use  for  evil  what  God  has  provided  to 
minister  to  their  good. 

There  was  a  time  when  it  was  commonly  supposed 
that  if  a  great  misfortune  befell  a  man,  it  was  evidence 
of  the  man's  having  committed  some  unusual  sin.  So 
the  people  with  whom  Jesus  had  to  do  interpreted  the 
calamity  that  befell  the  Galilseans  who  had  been  massa- 
cred by  Pilate,  and  the  victims  of  the  fallen  tower  at 
Siloam.  Of  this  view  Jesus  makes  short  work.  These 
men  were  not  greater  sinners  than  the  common  run 
of  men,  and  once  it  is  realised  how  much  is  involved 
in  the  principle  of  solidarity  and  moral  continuity, 
Jesus'  view  needs  no  defence.  The  Galilsean  massacre, 
the  accident  at  Siloam — each  was  the  result  of  proc- 
esses for  which  the  victims  were  not  more  responsible 
than  other  men.  There  is — as  the  consequence  of  our 
solidarity — ^a  law  of  moral  averages  in  human  society. 
Like  every  law,  it  has  its  exceptions,  but  it  is  unques- 
tionably true  that  the  morality  of  a  human  society  is 
very  much  of  a  piece.  You  may  have  your  saint  and 
your  criminal,  but  they  are  marginal  persons.  The 
rest  of  us  are  very  much  alike,  neither  wholly  black 
not  wholly  white,  but  clad  in  various  shades  of  grey. 

Hence  the  common  sense  of  Jesus'  w^arning  against 
Mt.7:i  censoriousness, — ''Judge  not  that  ye  be  not 
judged."  There  is,  as  someone  has  said,  ''so  much  good 
in  the  worst  of  us,  and  so  much  bad  in  the  best  of  us, 
that  it  does  not  become  any  of  us  to  say  anything  about 
the  rest  of  us."     Censoriousness  impHes  a  claim  of 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

moral  superiority,  a  claim  which  is  always  doubtful. 
That  is  why  Jesus  has  so  much  to  say  in  favor  of 
humility,  and  is  so  insistent  in  his  warning  to  ''him 
,  ^  ,^  ,,       that  exalteth  himself."     We  have  neither 

IiUke  14:11 

Luke  18:14  ^j^^  grouud  in  ourselves  nor  the  knowledge 
of  others  that  gives  us  a  title  to  pass  moral  judgments 
upon  them.  We  are,  all  the  same,  very  ready  to  pass 
moral  judgments,  and  with  great  presumption  to  pass 
very  summary  and  sweeping  judgments.  But  the  differ- 
ence between  us  all  is  never  other  than  the  difference 
between  more  grey  and  less  grey.  The  shading  is  so 
fine  that  it  requires  an  "eye  that  is  single"  to  detect  the 
differences.  And  none  of  us  have  that  particular  qual- 
ity of  eye.  We  are  all  in  the  region  of  the  moral  aver- 
age, and  it  is  the  strange  paradox  of  this  matter  that 
the  more  one  rises  above  that  plane,  the  more  inextric- 
ably does  one  feel  oneself  tied  to  it.  And  the  truth 
about  us  all  is  that  "except  ye  repent,  ye  shall  all 
Hkewise  perish." 

And  what  is  true  about  individuals  in  a  society  is 
true  of  societies  among  themselves.  There  also  soli- 
darity works  out  its  moral  average  in  precisely  the  same 
way.  And  in  modern  times  when  the  intercourse  of 
nations  has  become  so  close  and  intense,  this  is  more 
true  than  it  ever  was,  especially  among  those  nations 
that  are  called  civilized.  It  is  one  of  the  peculiarities 
of  a  state  of  war  that  it  destroys  our  power  of  moral 
discrimination.  And  in  supremely  critical  moments 
when  we  should  aim  at  the  severest  moral  realism,  we 

1 06 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

yield  to  the  worst  form  of  sentimentality.  The  enemy 
is  coal-black,  and  we  are  angels  of  light,  all  of  us, 
whoever  our  allies  may  be.  But  a  little  dispassionate 
reflection  should  serve  to  show  that  some  of  the  Allied 
nations  are  to-day  showing  unmistakable  symptoms  of 
the  moral  distemper  which  they  condemned  so  ve- 
hemently in  their  enemies.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  we 
have  shades  of  grey.  And  whatever  the  final  judg- 
ment may  be  on  the  relative  culpabilities  of  the  belliger- 
ents it  is  perfectly  sure  that  the  nations  involved  in 
the  late  war  stood  as  a  moral  unity  before  God,  reap- 
ing together  what  they  sowed  together. 

And  here  our  argument  brings  us  up  once  more  to 
the  need  of  mutual  forgiveness.  After  all,  we  are  in 
the  same  boat.  "Except  ye  repent,  ye  shall  all  like- 
wise perish."  What  is  there  for  us  to  do,  who  are 
guilty  of  each  other's  sins  and  have  to  pay  together 
for  each  other's  sins,  but  to  cease  from  mutual  judg- 
ment and  to  practice  the  grace  of  generous  mutual  for- 
giveness? 'Then  his  lord  said  to  him.  Thou  wicked 
Mt.  18:32-33  Servant,  I  forgave  thee  all  thy  debt,  because 
thou  besoughtest  me.  Shouldest  thou  not  also  have 
mercy  upon  thy  fellow-servant,  even  as  I  had  mercy 
upon  thee?"    And  as  William  Blake  asks, 

Why   should   punishment   weave   the   veil   with    iron 

wheels  of  war. 
When    forgiveness    might   weave    it   with   wings    of 

cherubim  ? 

107 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


"Ye  call  me  Teacher  and  Lord,  and  ye  say  well; 
for  so  I  am.  If  /,  then,  the  Lord  and  the  Teacher 
have  washed  your  feet,  ye  also  ought  to  wash  one 
another's  feet." 

"/  am  in  the  midst  of  you  as  he  that  serveth." 

One  of  the  most  common  illusions  that  men  harbour 
is  that  they  can  solve  a  problem  by  fighting  about  it. 
We  are  indeed  all  soaked  in  the  idealogy  of  conflict. 
But  we  should  by  now  have  learnt  that  a  conflict  which 
ends  in  the  victory  of  one  party  and  the  defeat  of 
the  other  has  not  been  settled.  The  problem  is  shelved 
and  not  solved,  and  it  will  come  up  for  solution  another 
day  when  solution  will  be  less  easy.  The  War  of  1870 
laid  the  train  of  the  War  of  191 4.  The  Homestead 
Strike  had  its  inevitable  sequel  in  the  Steel  strike  of 
1 919.  There  are  no  terminal  facilities  along  that 
line. 

We  heard  a  great  deal  about  ''the  moral  aims"  of  the 
World  W^ar;  and  many  people  sincerely  believed  that 
the  war  would  achieve  a  high  moral  purpose.  They 
spoke  of  its  ''righteousness"  and  undoubtedly  there  was 
a  question  of  political  "righteousness"  involved.  The 
public  law  of  Europe  had  been  violated,  and  it  had  to  be 
vindicated.  Now  we  can  here  raise  no  question  con- 
cerning war  as  a  political  measure  for  achieving  politi- 
cal ends.     But  the  question  still  remains  whether  war 

108 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

can  achieve  ends  which  are  moral  in  a  Christian  sense. 
The  answer  to  those  who  looked  for  some  great  moral 
achievement  as  the  result  of  the  war  is  simply — 
Circumspice,  look  around.  The  plain  truth  is  that  you 
may  go  to  war  to  achieve  moral  ends,  but  you  will 
no  more  achieve  moral  ends  through  war  than  you  will 
gather  figs  of  thistles.  You  may  have  political  justifi- 
cation for  war,  according  to  traditional  political  stan- 
dards, but  you  can  in  no  wise  moralise  its  processes. 
And  the  brave  attempts  to  moralise  the  processes  of  wai: 
through  the  Hague  Convention  went  for  next  to 
nothing  at  all  in  the  actual  business  of  the  late  war. 
However  fervently  you  may  pray  for  figs,  your  harvest 
will  be  thistles.  It  is  useless  to  say  that  the  end  justi- 
fies the  means  until  you  are  sure  that  the  means  can 
accomplish  the .  ends.  In  the  present  case,  the  moral 
end  was  associated  with  the  defeat  of  the  Central 
Powers.  The  Central  Powers  were  defeated,  but  the 
moral  end  of  extirpating  militarism  and  imperialism  is 
not  yet  accomplished,  and  it  appears  farther  from  ac- 
complishment than  it  was  in  19 14.  The  thistle  bush 
has  been  true  to  itself — it  has  grown  more  thistles.  Of 
course  if  the  defeat  of  the  Central  Powers  is  deemed  to 
be  in  itself  a  sufficient  return  for  the  cost  of  the  war, 
well  and  good.  But  we  are  speaking  now  of  the  ''moral 
aims"  of  the  war. 

Casuistic  arguments  about  the  use  of  force  are  not 
relevant,  for  force  of  whatever  kind,  physical  or 
spiritual,  is  a  gift  of  God  and  has  its  legitimate  uses. 

109 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

War  is  not  merely  an  exercise  of  force.  It  is  the  use 
of  force  under  conditions  which  for  one  thing  imply 
deceit  and  a  doctrine  of  calculated  and  systematic  per- 
version and  obscuration  of  truth.  And  even  worse, 
the  conditions  imply  a  contempt  of  personality  which 
is  a  concrete  rejection  of  the  law  of  solidarity  and  the 
principle  of  fellowship.  It  is  a  constructive  denial  (if 
the  phrase  be  permitted)  of  the  Christian  principle  of 
righteousness.  When  men  spoke  of  the  righteousness 
of  the  war  they  were  working  on  a  conception  of 
righteousness  that  was  based  upon  the  sanctity  of 
rights  that  are  always  potentially  and  for  the  most  part 
actually  in  conflict,  and  on  a  theory  of  justice  which 
requires  the  violent  vindication  of  violated  rights.  But 
it  is  intellectual  confusion  to  call  this  righteousness 
Christian.  It  is  Judaic,  Roman,  individualistic,  any- 
thing but  Christian,  if  we  are  to  take  the  New  Testa- 
ment as  the  authority  upon  Christianity. 

The  world  to-day  is  a  seething  welter  of  hate,  bitter- 
ness and  resentment,  and  so  far  from  having  ended  war, 
war  has  multiplied  wars.  And  so  long  as  those  tempers 
exist,  we  are  living  in  a  fools'  paradise  if  we  suppose 
that  we  are  not  all  the  time  on  the  brink  of  more  war. 
Moreover  we  have  no  guarantee  of  the  diminution  of 
these  tempers  except  as  the  nations  abandon  the  doc- 
trine of  particularist  rights  for  a  doctrine  of  common 
and  identical  interests.  The  Peace  Treaty  was  wrought 
out  apparently  on  the  assumption  that  while  the  Allies 
had  certain  common  interests,  they  had  none  in  which 

no 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  Central  Powers  had  any  share.  For  that  reason, 
it  is  a  treaty  of  anything  but  peace.  There  can  never 
be  anything  which  can  appropriately  be  described  as 
peace  until  the  nations  abandon  their  particularist  aims 
and  claims.  They  must  learn  to  order  their  lives  on  the 
basis  of  that  solidarity  which  determines  the  law  of 
human  life  and  the  moral  order  of  the  universe;  and 
which  makes  it  forever  impossible  that  the  misfortune 
or  the  decline  of  one  nation  can  be  advantageous  to 
another  nation.  This  is  a  revolution  of  thought  that 
will  take  a  long  time  to  accomplish ;  and  it  will  have  to 
begin  in  the  schools  by  (among  other  things)  laying 
the  stress  in  the  teaching  of  history  upon  those  influ- 
ences that  have  made  for  human  unity  rather  than  as  is 
now  the  case  upon  those  things  which  have  made  for 
division  and  disunion;  and  by  insisting  in  the  teach- 
ing of  geography  that  a  frontier  is  a  point  at 
which  people  meet  and  not  a  barrier  by  which  they  are 
separated,  a  rendezvous  and  not  a  party-wall. 

But  this  principle  holds  in  other  regions  as  well.  We 
are  to-day  in  the  midst  of  a  devastating  class-antago- 
nism, and  it  is  as  sure  as  anything  can  well  be  that  there 
is  no  deliverance  to  be  had  from  ''class-war"  by  "fight- 
ing it  out."  For  that  will  only  multiply  bitterness  and 
cause  life  to  be  governed  for  an  indefinite  time  by  the 
politics  of  resentment.  It  is  frequently  being  said  by 
well-meaning  people  that  the  interests  of  capital  and 
labor  are  identical,  and  the  saying  has  a  fine  Chris- 
tian sound.     But  while  industry  is  dominated  by  the 

III 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

profit-system,  and  labor  is  subject  to  the  wage-system, 
it  is  difficult  to  see  how  the  interests  of  capital  and  labor 
are  identical.  Of  course  the  idtimate  interests  of  both 
are  identical  in  their  character  as  groups  of  men,  but 
these  are  not  the  interests  under  discussion.  The 
human  interests  of  both  classes  and  the  material  inter- 
ests of  the  working  class  suffer  equally  under  the 
present  industrial  order;  and  it  should  be  plain  that 
there  can  be  no  peace  or  fellowship  in  industry  until 
industry  is  organised  upon  a  basis  other  than  the  profit- 
and-wage  system  which  at  present  prevails.  Can  this 
hindrance  to  fellowship  be  removed  without  denying 
fellowship  in  the  act?  Short-sighted  capitalists  may 
suppose  that  they  can  resist  the  drift  of  change  and 
short-sighted  workers  may  imagine  that  they  can  hasten 
the  change  by  fighting  it  out.  But  that  is  pure  illusion. 
If  the  possessing  classes  were  wise  in  their  generation, 
they  would  act  upon  the  advice  of  Jesus, — "Agree  with 
3at.5!25  thine  adversary  quickly  while  thou  art  with 
him  in  the  way,"  and  make  large  voluntary  progressive 
renunciations  of  wealth  and  power;  then  we  might 
thread  a  way  out  of  the  present  tangle.  But  the  re- 
nunciations of  the  possessing  classes  must  be  responded 
to  by  the  good  will  of  the  workers.  And  in  an  atmos- 
phere of  reason  and  good-will  (the  antithesis  of  Ver- 
sailles), Capital  and  Labor  might  work  out  something 
deeper  than  industrial  peace, — a  living  creative  fellow- 
ship in  the  interests  of  the  community.    When  the  em- 

112 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ployer  and  the  worker  shall  say  each  for  himself  out  of 
Luke  22:27  a  pure  heart,  ''I  am  among  you  as  he  that 
serveth,"  then  is  the  Kingdom  of  God  come  among  us. 
But  will  it  so  come? 

It  is  clear  that  if  the  basis  of  our  common  life  is  to 
be  shifted  from  the  present  doctrine  of  particularist 
rights  to  a  doctrine  of  common  interests,  there  must 
be  something  like  what  Nietzsche  called  "a  transvalua- 
tion  of  values."  And  speaking  roughly,  the  transla- 
tion must  be  from  the  material  to  the  spiritual  valua- 
tion of  life.  Men  will  never  see  that  their  interests  are 
identical  so  long  as  those  interests  are  conceived  in 
terms  of  money-values  as  they  are  to-day.  If  it  is 
to  my  interest  to  get  as  large  a  portion  of  the  cake 
as  possible,  then  by  no  showing  can  my  interest  be 
identical  with  my  neighbour  who  also  wants  the  larg- 
est possible  share  of  the  cake.  For  the  cake  is  after 
all  at  any  particular  moment  definite  and  limited  in 
size.  Men's  interests  are  identical  only  under  condi- 
tions in  which  every  man  can  obtain  all  that  he  has 
capacity  for,  without  impoverishing  any  other  man, 
and  those  conditions  obtain  only  in  respect  of  the  things 
that  we  may  broadly  call  spiritual.  And  when  a  man 
finds  a  sufficiency  of  these  things,  he  inevitably  rele- 
gates to  a  subordinate  place  the  material  goods  in  the 
acquisition  of  which  the  good  of  life  is  to-day  supposed 
to  lie.  The  ascendancy  of  the  economic  motive  provokes 
and  perpetuates  conflict ;  and  it  is  only  as  men  perceive 
the  sovereignty  of  spiritual  values  and  the  promise  they 

113 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

hold  of  fullness  of  life  that  the  economic  motive  and 
the  competitive  system  will  disappear.  And  the  sov- 
ereignty of  the  spiritual  values  implies  practically  two 
things :  first,  that  the  acquisitive  life  is  supplanted  by 
the  creative  and  redemptive  life,  and  that  the  chief 
end  of  life  is  seen  to  lie  in  the  doing  of  works  of  love 
and  beauty;  and  second,  that  the  priority  of  life  is  es- 
tablished over  every  institution,  political  or  religious, 
every  dogma,  theological  or  economic,  every  system 
whether  of  business  or  of  government.  It  is  a  recogni- 
tion of  the  centrality  of  the  soul  for  thought  and  action, 
and  a  refusal  to  subordinate  the  human  spirit  to  the 
requirements  of  Church  or  State  or  Market. 


"And  other  sheep  I  have  which  are  not  of  this  fold; 
them  also  T  must  bring  .  .  .  and  they  shall  become 
one  Hock,  one  shepherd/' 

The  logic  of  the  ideal  of  fellowship  cannot  reach  a 
conclusion  until  it  has  embraced  the  whole  of  mankind. 

Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  has  told  us  that  mankind  is  for- 
ever "pursuing  the  boundary  of  its  possible  com- 
munity." What  we  see  in  the  history  of  man,  so  far 
as  we  know  it,  is  a  constant  impulse  to  broaden  the 
geographical  basis  of  fellowship.  First  the  family, 
then  the  tribe,  then  the  nation,  and  now  vast  aggrega- 

114 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tions  of  people  within  the  same  political  unity,  such  as 
the  United  States  of  America  and  the  British  Empire. 
It  is  held  by  some  that  the  expansion  of  the  social 
unit  has  reached  its  term  in  what  we  call  the  nation 
and  that  nationality  is  a  permanent  principle  in  the  life 
of  the  world.  In  a  sense  that  is  true;  for  nationality 
represents  in  the  realm  of  human  life  the  variation  of 
type  which  is  common  to  all  life.  But  to  say  that  the 
expansion  of  a  man's  social  grasp  stops  with  the  nation 
is  to  talk  nonsense.  For  the  nation  is  simply  a  stage 
in  the  providential  order  by  which  the  cave-man  is  to 
grow  at  last  into  a  citizen  of  the  world. 

It  may,  however,  be  true  that  the  world  of  men  will 
always  be  organized  upon  the  basis  of  nationality.  But 
it  is  also  true  that  the  nations  which  have  a  definite 
existence  to-day  have  no  fixity  of  tenure.  The  national 
being  is  a  fluid  affair,  always  subject  to  modification 
and  change  of  many  kinds.  Nations  are  not  made  by 
a  community  of  race  or  of  language  or  of  faith,  but  by 
a  community  of  tradition  and  memory.  There  are  to- 
day no  "thoroughbred"  nations,  or  monoglot  nations 
or  nations  holding  a  common  faith.  What  gives  unity 
to  the  national  mind  is  the  memory  and  tradition  of 
great  things  done  together.  The  national  qualities 
have  been  produced  by  the  processes  of  the  common  life, 
and  there  is  no  guarantee  that  any  of  them  are  per- 
manent and  unchangeable.  It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose 
that  a  nation  has  any  necessary  fixity  of  character  or 
of  characteristic.     And  nationality  is  in  no  wise  to  be 

115 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

regarded  as  an  absolute  principle  for  the  determination 
of  conduct. 

The  disrepute  of  the  national  principle  is  due  to  the 
fact  that  it  has  worked  in  the  world  as  a  principle  of 
division  and  a  root  of  conflict.  It  has  represented  too 
often  nothing  but  the  massed  egoism  of  a  community. 
But  there  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  it  need  be  a 
divisive  influence  in  perpetuity.  On  the  contrary,  the 
current  discussion  of  a  League  of  Nations  proves  that 
already  the  social  grasp  of  man  is  faintly  embracing 
the  whole  world.  That  we  speak  gravely  of  a  League 
of  Nations  is  a  fact  of  much  greater  importance  than 
the  prospects  of  a  particular  league,  for  it  means  that 
there  has  been  a  very  large  and  general  extension  of 
the  social  vision  of  the  average  man. 

But  we  shall  look  in  vain  for  any  living  League  of 
Nations  until  the  nations  agree  to  discard  their  self- 
regarding  policies  and  sincerely  accept  the  doctrine  and 
practice  of  international  reciprocity.  The  "hard-shell" 
nationalist  will  probably  say  that  it  is  the  business  of 
the  nation  to  defend  and  to  pursue  its  own  interests 
regardless  of  other  interests,  and  that  the  code  of  per- 
sonal morals  does  not  apply  to  the  nation.  This,  how- 
ever, involves  us  in  a  moral  dualism  of  a  peculiarly 
destructive  kind  and  which  is  indeed  hardly  dis- 
tinguishable from  a  kind  of  atheism.  There  are  on 
this  view  two  moral  orders,  contradictory  and  mutually 
exclusive,  in  the  universe;  so  that  the  universe  is  a 
house  divided  against  itself,  an  equation  which  cancels 

ii6 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

out,  landing  you  in  a  moral  nihilism.  And  you  are 
left  with  a  yea-and-nay  Deity,  a  God  who  "faces  North 
by  South."  This  simply  will  not  do.  We  have  to  ac- 
cept the  view  that  there  is  one  and  only  one  moral  order 
for  men  and  nations  alike.  And  the  law  of  fellow- 
ship is  as  binding  on  nations  as  it  is  on  persons. 

A  League  of  Nations  is  not  necessarily  the  world 
fellowship  of  mankind.  The  League  may  work  rather 
as  an  organ  of  equilibration  than  as  an  organ  of  co- 
operation, as  a  means  of  settling  disputes  than  as  an 
organ  of  mutual  service.  And  so  long  as  self-regard 
reigns  in  the  world  of  nations  the  best  the  League  can 
do  is  to  preserve  a  precarious  peace  for  a  season.  Soon 
or  late,  its  constituents  will  fly  asunder  under  the  pres- 
sure of  their  centrifugal  egoism.  It  is  only  as  an  organ 
of  positive  and  planned  cooperation  in  the  service  of 
life  that  any  League  of  Nations  is  entitled  to  cherish 
an  expectation  of  life  for  itself. 

Long  ago,  Adam  Smith  saw  that  at  bottom  the 
economic  interests  of  the  nations  were  identical.  He 
saw  that  every  nation  had  been  fitted  to  produce  cer- 
tain commodities  and  that  the  wealth  of  nations  was 
best  served  by  the  unhampered  circulation  of  the  com- 
modities that  they  produced.  He  therefore  advocated 
the  removal  of  all  barriers  to  the  exchange  of  com- 
modities and  became  the  father  of  ''free  trade."  But 
free  trade  was  hard  hit  by  competitive  trade  and  never 
acquired  that  character  of  free  and  balanced  reciprocity 
which  Adam  Smith  had  in  mind.     Nor  will  it,  until 

117 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tariff  walls  are  pulled  down  and  there  is  a  League  of 
Nations  which  is  (among  other  things)  a  clearing 
house  for  the  free  and  emancipated  trade  of  the  world. 
Then  shall  come  to  pass  the  dream  of  William  Blake : 

In  my  exchanges  every  land 

Shall  walk ;  and  mine  in  every  land, 

Mutual  shall  build  Jerusalem, 

Both  heart  in  heart  and  hand  in  hand. 

When  Jerusalem  was  about  to  be  rebuilt  after  the 
exile,  Zechariah  insisted  that  it  should  be  built  without 
walls.  This  is  a  great  and  precious  parable.  In  this 
world  there  are  broadly  two  types  of  mind,  one  that 
builds  walls  and  another  that  pulls  them  down.  There 
are  those  people  who  build  tariff-walls  in  order  to  keep 
the  foreign  merchant  out;  there  are  others  who  build 
walls  of  steel  in  order  to  warn  any  possible  enemy  to 
keep  his  distance;  still  others  build  credal  walls,  to 
keep  the  unbeliever  out  of  the  holy  place;  and  there 
are  those  who  build  caste  walls  in  order  to  keep  the 
"lower  classes"  in  their  place.  But  there  are  those  also 
who  live  to  break  down  these  walls  and  to  broaden  out 
the  basis  of  human  fellowship.  Of  these  the  greatest 
is  Jesus.  He  raised  no  wall  around  himself,  nor  did 
he  fence  his  church  around  against  any  man.  Con- 
i.nke9:5o  sider  his  tolerance :  **He  that  is  not  against 
you  is  for  you."  Consider  his  catholicity :  "I  have  not 
Mt  8-10  found  so  great  faith,  no,  not  in  Israel."  Con- 
luke  23:34  gj^j^j-  j^jg  charity :    "Father,  forgive  them  for 

ii8 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

they  know  not  what  they  do/*  His  love  had  no  fron- 
tiers. St.  Paul  says  that  he  broke  down  the  middle  wall 
Epii.2:i4  of  partition  between  the  Jew  and  the  Greek 
and  in  so  doing  he  broke  down  every  party-wall  in 
the  world.  When  he  saw  the  multitudes,  distressed 
and  scattered,  as  sheep  not  having  a  shepherd,  he  surely 
saw  also  away  beyond  the  generations  another  day 
when  not  only  the  lost  sheep  of  the  House  of  Israel, 
but  the  other  sheep  which  were  not  of.  that  fold,  should 
John  10:16  be  gathered  in  "and  they  shall  become  one 
flock,  one  shepherd." 


119 


CHAPTER  FIVE 
YESTERDAY  AND  TOMORROW 

(Matt.  5:17-20;  Mark  11:15-18;  17:24-27;  Luke  22 
14-23 ;  Luke  24) 


''Ye  have  heard  that  it  was  said  to  them  of  old  time 
.  .  .  hut  I  say  unto  you  .  .  ." 

TO  respect  tradition,  as  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton 
says  somewhere,  is  but  to  extend  the  vote  to 
our  ancestors.  On  the  other  hand,  James  Rus- 
sell Lowell  said  in  one  of  his  poems  that  ''time  makes 
ancient  good  uncouth."  These  statements  apparently 
contradict  one  another.  But  they  are  contradictory 
only  if  we  *'lump"  all  the  past  into  one  undifferentiated 
whole.  The  human  past  like  every  human  thing  is 
mingled  good  and  evil.  There  are  things  that  we  can 
learn  from  our  forefathers  but  we  should  be  foolish 
to  suppose  that  they  can  teach  us  everything  or  that 
nothing  is  worth  learning  except  what  they  can  teach 
us.  For  they  were  no  more  omniscient  or  infallible 
than  their  descendants  are.     Moreover,  life  is  not  a 

120 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

static  thing.  It  is  forever  growing  out  of  last  year's 
clothes.  The  ancient  good  does  sometimes  go  out  of 
date. 

Men  sort  themselves  out  on  various  principles,  and 
one  of  these  is  their  attitude  to  the  past.  Here  they 
range  from  a  rigid  conservatism  through  various  shades 
of  liberalism  to  a  thorough-going  radicalism.  The 
word  radical  is  derived  from  the  Latin  word  radix, 
which  means  a  root.  And  so  a  radical  is  a  person  who 
is  concerned  with  roots,  generally  with  a  view  to  pull- 
ing them  up.  There  are  doubtless  some  radicals  who 
look  upon  all  roots  with  equal  dislike  and  want  nothing 
so  much  as  to  dig  them  all  out.  For  them  the  past 
contains  no  promise,  and  the  only  thing  to  do  with 
it  is  to  break  with  it  utterly  and  to  start  out  afresh. 
But  that  type  of  radicalism  ignores  the  continuity  of 
life,  and  whatever  we  may  think  of  our  inheritance 
from  the  past  the  one  thing  that  we  cannot  do  with  it 
is  to  wipe  it  out.  We  may  upset  a  few  institutions, 
but  the  greater  part  of  what  we  have  inherited  from 
the  past,  whether  for  good  or  evil,  is  within  us.  The 
past  has  written  itself  into  our  very  lives,  and  we  all 
carry  it  about  with  us.  And  outside  of  us,  life  is  so 
intricately  organized  and  so  bound  up  with  institutions 
that  we  cannot  destroy  one  institution — not  to  speak 
of  a  clean  sweep  of  institutions — without  involving 
life  in  much  confusion. 

But  there  is  a  real  sense  in  which  every  man  should 
be  a  radical.     We  should  all  be  concerned  about  the 

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THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

roots  of  things.  And  the  roots  of  things  are  not  all 
good  or  all  bad.  Some  roots  are  good  and  some  are 
bad.  Some  are  partly  good  and  partly  bad.  The  right 
type  of  radicalism  is  that  which  wants  to  pull  up  the 
bad  roots.  But  the  very  reason  for  pulling  up  the  bad 
roots  is  precisely  the  reason  for  preserving  the  good 
roots.  So  that  the  true  radical  is  also  the  true  con- 
servative. 

The  true  conservative,  observe.  For  just  as  there 
is  a  radicalism  that  discredits  itself  by  its  excess,  so 
there  is  a  conservatism  that  defeats  itself  by  its  own 
blind  rigidity.  Things  as  they  are,  it  says,  are  as  they 
should  be;  the  great  Bad  is  change.  Of  course  some 
conservatism  is  pure  selfishness.  It  resists  change  be- 
cause it  would  interfere  with  its  comfort.  But  we  need 
not  seriously  discuss  that  kind  of  conservatism,  for  it 
is  only  contemptible.  We  are  thinking  now  of  honest 
conservatism  which  believes  that  the  world  as  it  is 
needs  no  improvement.  It  is  a  curious  frame  of  mind. 
If  life  stood  still  in  a  perfect  world,  something  might 
be  said  for  it.  But  as  the  world  is  palpably  far  from 
perfect,  and  as  life  does  not  stand  still,  the  conservatism 
that  resists  change  in  the  end  hastens  it  by  its  very 
resistance. 

Beside  the  radical  and  the  conservative,  we  have  the 
liberal  always  with  us.  He  is  the  progressive  person, 
the  reformer,  who  accepts  the  existing  framework  of 
life  as  a  whole  but  sees  that  it  is  capable  of  improve- 
ment.    He  aims  to  make  it  better,  to  humanise,  to 

122 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

reform  it.  He  sees  that  the  privileged  classes  have 
more  power  and  a  richer  life  than  the  common  people, 
and  he  is  therefore  on  the  side  of  the  common  people 
as  against  the  privileged.  He  works  for  education, 
for  industrial  reform,  for  ''uplift."  But  always  within 
the  existing  order.  The  conservative  wants  to  preserve 
the  existing  order,  the  liberal  wants  to  improve  it,  the 
radical  wants  to  change  it. 

What  men  really  need  is  a  critical  and  discriminating 
attitude  to  life,  which  can  be  conservative,  liberal,  or 
radical  as  the  occasion  requires,  which  does  not  love 
change  for  the  sake  of  change,  yet  is  "not  afraid  of 
what  is  called  for  by  the  instinct  of  mankind."  This 
attitude  is  indeed  attended  by  the  danger  of  becoming 
a  sort  of  judicial  apathy,  just  as  the  extremes  of  radi- 
calism and  conservatism  tend  to  self-defeating  violence. 
But  if  the  will  is  harnessed  to  the  judgment,  this 
attitude  of  criticism  and  discrimination  is  the  best 
guarantee  and  influence  for  a  right  and  fruitful  order- 
ing of  Hfe.  As  things  are,  life  has  to  ''muddle  through," 
and  when  one  considers  what  a  slough  of  partisan  cries 
and  labels,  of  prejudices  and  outworn  tranditions  it 
has  to  muddle  through,  there  is  reason  to  be  grateful 
that  things  are  as  well  with  it  as  they  are. 

It  would  be  utter  foolishness  to  attach  any  of  these 
conventional  labels  to  Jesus.  The  only  thing  we  can 
do  is  to  attach  none  of  them  or  all  of  them.  For  Jesus 
was  conservative,  liberal,  radical,  all  the  time.    He  had 

123 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

no  respect  for  an  institution  merely  because  it  was  old ; 
Mark  11:15-17  yet  the  cleansing  of  the  Temple  was  an 
act  of  the  finest  and  purest  conservatism.  He  was 
conservative  enough  to  believe  in  the  permanent  validity 
Mt.5:i8  of  the  Law — *Till  heaven  and  earth  shall 

pass  away,  one  jot  or  one  tittle  shall  not  pass  away 
from  the  law.  .  .  ."  Yet  his  attitude  to  the  Law  was 
very  much  like  the  attitude  of  the  modern  theological 
Luke  17:14  liberal  to  the  creeds.  He  was  conservative 
Mt.i7|24-27  g^Q^gj^  tQ  p^y  tl^g  Temple  tax — the  half- 
shekel — and  to  bid  cleansed  lepers  go  show  themselves 
to  the  priest ;  but  he  was  too  radical  to  continue  within 
the  existing  religious  institutions  and  deliberately  set 
out  on  a  course  which  he  believed  would  presently  leave 
them  derelict.  He  was  indeed  so  radical  that  the  re- 
ligious conservatives  of  his  day  put  him  to  death. 

It  is  clear  that  to  the  mind  of  Jesus  the  human  in- 
heritance from  the  past  was  a  mingling  of  good  and 
bad.  But  the  good  was  never  quite  good  enough  and 
the  bad  was  often  but  the  good  perverted  by  wicked 
or  stupid  people.  His  own  great  inheritance  from 
the  past  like  that  of  every  Jew  was  the  law.  But  good 
and  great  as  the  Law  was,  it  was  not  good  enough 
or  great  enough  for  the  entire  business  of  life. 
Moreover  in  the  hands  of  the  Scribes  and  the  Pharisees 
it  became  a  positive  evil  and  defeated  those  humane 
ends  which  it  had  been  intended  to  serve.  So  far  from 
abrogating  the  Law  he  declared  that  he  had  come  to 
fulfil  it ;  but  he  gave  no  quarter  to  the  official  interpre- 

124 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tation  of  it.  This  official  interpretation  of  it  was  what 
Mark  7:3  is  Called  in  the  Gospels  "the  traditions  of 
the  elders."  To  this,  the  attitude  of  Jesus  was  one  of 
the  purest  radicalism.  He  would  destroy  it  root  and 
branch.  For  it  was  no  heritage  but  an  incubus,  *'bind- 
Mt.23:4  ing  upon  men  burdens  heavy  and  grievous 

to  be  borne."  Jesus  always  "distinguished  between 
things  that  differed."  He  was  in  all  things  a  realist, 
always  on  guard  against  conventional  and  traditional 
valuations  that  had  been  falsified  by  time.  He  chal- 
lenged all  things  to  declare  themselves,  to  show  what 
they  were  not  in  appearance  but  in  reality.  He  brought 
everything  to  his  own  consistent  test, — Does  this  thing 
make  for  life,  for  fellowship?  Nothing  was  either 
good  or  bad  merely  because  it  was  old;  it  was  good 
or  bad  according  as  it  made  for  the  increase  or  the 
arrest  of  life  and  love. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  speculate  what  would 
happen  if  by  some  miracle  the  inhabitants  of  a  country 
were  in  a  short  space  of  time  to  acquire  this  critical 
and  discriminating  attitude  of  Jesus.  Some  things  are 
pretty  certain.  The  existing  political  parties  would 
disappear.  The  present  religious  sectarianism  would 
also  vanish.  Men  would  make  haste  to  discard  those 
partisan  labels  in  which  they  have  to-day  so  na'ive  and 
pathetic  a  faith.  Radicalism  would  make  an  entente 
cordiale  with  conservatism,  not  by  a  colorless  com- 
promise but  by  a  rational  synthesis.  The  mere  passion 
for  change  would  be  as  rare  as  the  mere  aversion  to 

125 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

change,  yet  there  would  be  changes  both  vast  and  deep. 
Men  would  order  life  not  by  party  conflict  but  by 
common  counsel;  they  would  seek  truth  not  in  con- 
troversy but  in  fellowship.  They  would  no  longer 
confound  truth  with  tradition,  or  faith  with  creed, 
or  society  with  institutions,  or  life  with  its  forms. 
John  8:32  They  would  see  the  truth,  and  the  truth 
would  make  them  free. 


"They  have  Moses  and  the  prophets;  let  them  hear 
them" 

But  institutions,  traditions,  forms,  creeds, — these  are 
after  all  the  lesser  part  of  what  yesterday  has  be- 
queathed to  us.  Greater  than  any  or  all  of  these  is 
the  rich  treasury  of  human  experience  which  is  em- 
bodied in  history.  The  past  is  the  quarry  out  of  which 
we  draw  the  raw  material  of  knowledge  which  thought 
turns  into  wisdom  for  the  guidance  of  life.  So  at 
least  it  ought  to  be.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  the 
story  of  the  human  past  is  a  closed  book  to  most 
people,  and  most  of  those  who  have  some  historical 
knowledge  do  not  know  the  vital  side  of  it.  For  the 
history  which  we  learn  at  school  or  college  is  merely 
the  shell  of  history.  We  read  about  the  outer  course 
of  events,  but  we  hear  little  about  the  hidden  influences 
— the  ideas,  the  feelings,  the  aspirations — which  have 

126 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

determined  the  drift  of  human  affairs.  We  become 
more  or  less  familiar  with  a  chronicle,  but  we  are  left 
without  the  interpretation  of  it.  Least  of  all  have  we 
come  to  regard  history  as  the  record  of  humanity  at 
school,  proving  a  very  slow  pupil,  but  gleaning  here 
and  there  a  morsel  of  wisdom. 

Human  nature  is  always  and  everywhere  very  much 
the  same.  The  natural  differences  between  men  are 
rarely  more  than  skin  deep.  And  the  world  changes 
but  slowly.  So  that  life  in  this  world  has  always  pro- 
duced the  same  general  kinds  of  experience.  That 
is  why  so  much  ancient  literature  is  Hving  still.  It  is 
a  record  of  men's  experience  of  life  and  wherever  men 
have  been  able  to  tell  about  it  with  truth  and  power, 
they  have  told  an  undying  story.  We  still  read,  for 
instance,  the  Book  of  Psalms  because  it  is  for  the 
greater  part  an  apt,  powerful  and  sometimes  very  beau- 
tiful transcript  of  what  a  number  of  men  found  in 
their  own  souls  as  they  went  their  way  in  the  world. 
And  in  the  same  way,  for  the  man  who  has  insight 
enough  to  read  between  its  lines,  the  record  of  human 
history  is  full  of  suggestion  for  the  conduct  of  life  to- 
day. For  all  through  history,  the  same  causes  have 
produced  the  same  effects.  History  is  a  mine  of  wis- 
dom which  yesterday  has  bequeathed  to  to-day  for  the 
good  of  to-day  and  to-morrow.  It  is  full  of  analogies, 
comparisons,  parallels,  illustrations,  that  can  be  used 
for  warning  or  for  inspiration  or  for  illumination.  It 
embodies    certain    general    principles    and    tendencies 

127 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

which  have  produced  their  characteristic  results  all 
through  the  ages  and  are  valid  still  for  the  manage- 
ment of  life.  History  is  one  of  the  most  fruitful 
words  of  God  to  men. 

Jesus  was  well  versed  in  the  history  of  his  own 
people;  and  he  is  constantly  appealing  to  it.  In  the 
Gospel  of  Luke  alone,  he  alludes  to  Elijah  and  the 
widow  of  Sarepta,  to  Elisha  and  Naaman  the  Syrian, 
to  David  and  the  shewbread,  to  Sodom,  Tyre  and 
Sidon,  to  Jonah  and  the  Ninevites,  to  Solomon  and 
the  Queen  of  Sheba,  to  Abel  and  a  certain  Zachariah, 
to  Abraham,  Isaac,  Jacob,  Noah,  Lot  and  his  wife. 
It  is  easy  to  see  how  full  of  meaning  for  the  present 
he  found  the  past.  Time  does  indeed  make  much  an- 
cient good  uncouth.  But  the  experience  of  man  is 
never  stale  or  obsolete  to  the  understanding  mind.  And 
when  Jesus  was  confronted  with  a  triple  temptation, 
he  met  it  with  words  that  had  come  down  long  ages 
and  had  stood  the  test  of  the  spiritual  conflicts  of 
many  generations.  And  when  he  formulated  his  own 
program,  he  did  it  not  in  words  of  his  own,  but  in 
i.uke4:i8  the  words  of  an  old  prophetic  vision.  "The 
Spirit  of  the  Lord  is  upon  me;  for  he  hath  anointed 
me  to  preach  good  tidings  to  the  poor.  He  hath  sent 
me  to  proclaim  release  to  the  captives,  and  recovering 
of  sight  to  the  blind,  to  set  at  liberty  them  that  are 
bruised,  to  proclaim  the  acceptable  year  of  the  Lord." 

A  good  deal  of  our  human  trouble — perhaps  most — 
might  be  averted  if  we  took  pains  to  know  and  under- 

128 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

stand  our  common  history,  and  came  to  it  with  an 
open  mind.  History  may  be  so  interpreted  as  to  serve 
a  merely  private  or  partisan  purpose,  in  which  case 
its  Hght  is  turned  to  darkness.  But  if  the  eye  be  single, 
the  whole  past  is  full  of  light.  Yet  we  are  strangely 
slow  to  learn  from  history  or  indeed  from  our  own 
experience  "the  things  that  belong  to  our  peace."  When 
the  disciples  had  one  day  fallen  into  a  stupid  bewilder- 
ment, because  Jesus  had  bidden  them  "beware  of  the 
leaven  of  the  Pharisees,"  and  they  fell  to  saying  among 
themselves  that  he  had  said  the  thing  because  they 
had  no  bread  with  them,  Jesus  reproved  them:  "Do 
Mark 8:14-21  yc  uot  yet  Understand?"  After  all  they 
had  seen  they  had  not  learned  enough  to  know  a  little 
parable  when  they  saw  it.  And  that  is  indeed  a  sort 
of  epitome  of  our  human  story.  Long  before  this 
Isaiah  had  complained, — "Israel  doth  not  know,  my 
people  doth  not  consider."  And  so  it  is  to  this  day. 
Consider,  for  instance,  this.  If  there  is  one  thing  about 
which  the  witness  of  history  is  clear,  it  is  that  you 
cannot  destroy  a  dissenting  opinion  by  coercion.  Not 
only  so,  but  an  opinion  persecuted  is  an  opinion  es- 
tablished. "The  blood  of  the  martyrs  is  the  seed  of 
the  Church."  We  see  the  mistakes  that  our  fathers 
made  in  this  matter  and  we  know  that  they  were 
mistakes.  Yet  when  our  turn  comes,  we  go  on  and 
Mt.  23:29  make  the  same  mistake.  We  "build  the 
tombs  of  the  prophets"  that  our  fathers  put  to  death, 
and  we  kill   others  whom  our  children  will  honor 

129 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

as  heroes  and  saints.  In  point  of  fact,  dissent  has 
always  been  the  growing  point  of  society,  and  a  so- 
ciety which  is  mindful  of  its  own  peace  and  growth 
will  at  least  practice  toleration,  which  is  a  grace  of 
spirit  as  well  as  a  good  policy.  But  toleration  comes 
hard  to  most  societies.  We  do  not  yet  understand. 
And  so  history  repeats  itself.  But  there  is  no  fatality 
about  this.  We  can  prevent  history  from  repeating 
itself  if  we  choose.  But  we  shall  first  have  to  know 
the  history  of  the  race  and  to  ponder  it  before  we 
shall  have  either  the  wit  or  the  will  to  prevent  it  from 
repeating  itself. 

There  is  one  very  remarkable  omission  in  Jesus' 
references  to  the  past.  The  prophets  almost  without 
exception  return  again  and  again  to  the  story  of  the 
deliverance  from  Egypt.  But  so  far  as  the  gospels 
tell  us,  Jesus  never  once  alluded  to  it.  The  silence  is 
as  significant  as  if,  say,  Abraham  Lincoln  had  never 
referred  to  the  war  of  the  Revolution.  The  omission 
must  have  been  deliberate;  but  concerning  the  reason 
of  it,  we  can  only  speculate.  The  Jew  saw  in  the 
episode  the  beginning  of  the  history  of  his  people  as 
a  nation  and  every  year  he  celebrated  the  anniversary 
of  it  with  great  solemnity.  In  this  celebration  Jesus 
did  indeed  join,  and  this  makes  his  neglect  of  it  in  his 
teaching  still  more  significant.  Yet  perhaps  we  may 
see  the  clue  to  Jesus'  silence  concerning  the  event  in 
the  fact  that  after  his  last  celebration  of  it,  he  seems 
inke 22:14-23  to  havc  deliberately  superseded  the  pass- 

130 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

over  by  another  rite,  the  memorial  supper  which  he 
instituted  in  the  upper  room.  He  undoubtedly  saw 
that  the  Hfe  of  his  nation  was  moving  toward  a  climax 
of  tragedy.  He  mourned  that  Jerusalem  did  not  know 
the  things  that  belonged  to  its  peace;  and  the  time 
was  coming  when  its  house  would  be  left  desolate. 
That  period  which  had  begun  with  the  deliverance  and 
Moses  was  ending  in  disaster  and  miscarriage.  That 
spiritual  ministry  to  which  God  has  called  this  people 
had  been  swamped  by  a  narrow  national  and  political 
purpose,  which  was  being  pursued  by  methods  of  vio- 
lence and  intrigue,  and  which  was,  we  may  not  doubt, 
encouraged  by  a  patriotic  appeal  to  the  story  of  the 
deliverance.  And  now  that  stage  was  coming  to  an 
end.  What  would  it  profit  to  speak  of  a  beginning 
when  that  which  had  begun  was  so  near  to  ending, 
especially  when  the  story  of  the  beginning  was  used 
to  inspire  conduct  which  would  only  hasten  the  end- 
ing? And  already,  a  new  period  was  at  the  door. 
Jesus  regarded  himself  as  the  symbol  and  the  begin- 
ning of  a  new  stage  in  human  affairs.  He  was  not 
forgetful  of  much  that  was  great  and  abiding  in  the 
past  of  his  people,  and  of  how  deeply  his  own  roots  ran 
Luke  24:27  into  the  past,  ''beginning  with  Moses  and 
the  prophets";  but  his  face  was  turned  to  the  future. 


131 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 


''The  Kingdom  of  heaven  cometh  not  with  observa- 
tion: neither  shall  they  say,  Lo,  here!  or  There!  for 
lo!  the  kingdom  of  God  is  within  you.'' 

About  his  own  personal  future,  Jesus  seems  after 
Peter's  confession  at  Caesarea  Philippi  to  have  been  in 
no  doubt.  The  significance  of  this  prevision  we  shall 
discuss  in  the  next  chapter.  And  so  far  as  individuals 
are  concerned,  his  counsel  to  them  was  that  they  should 
not  trouble  themselves  overmuch  about  the  future. 
Mt.6:34  "Be  not  anxious  for  the  morrow."     Live 

one  day  at  a  time  and  leave  the  rest  to  your  heavenly 
Father.  Mark  Rutherford  in  the  preface  to  the  sec- 
ond edition  of  his  Autobiography  encourages  his 
readers  to  cultivate  ''the  good  habit  of  not  looking 
round  the  corner."  And  that  might  serve  as  a  sum- 
mary of  what  Jesus  had  to  say  on  the  matter  to  or- 
dinary folk.  This  is  not,  however,  to  be  taken  as  a 
justification  for  a  reckless  improvidence.  Only  they 
who  seek  first  the  kingdom  of  God  and  his  righteous- 
ness can  afford  not  to  be  anxious  for  the  morrow. 

It  has  been  held  by  some  scholars  that  the  teaching 
of  Jesus  is  deeply  colored  by  the  expectation  of  a 
sudden  end  of  the  age.  The  world  as  men  knew  it 
was  coming  to  an  end,  and  when  the  new  world  took 
its  place,  life  would  be  on  an  entirely  new  basis.  And 
the  teaching  of  Jesus  is  therefore  held  to  deal  with  the 

132 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

way  men  should  carry  themselves  in  the  short  period 
before  the  world  should  reach  its  end.  He  taught, 
as  these  scholars  say,  an  interim-ethic.  He  did  not 
mean  his  teaching  to  be  taken  as  a  rule  for  ordinary 
times ;  it  was  a  special  rule  for  that  particular  moment 
of  time. 

This  is  a  very  convenient  way  of  shelving  the  pe- 
culiar difficulty  of  living  out  the  precept  of  Jesus  in 
one's  own  time.  But  it  rests  upon  the  assumption  that 
it  is  certain  that  Jesus  expected  the  end  of  the  age 
to  come  as  many  of  his  own  fellow-countrymen  un- 
doubtedly did  at  that  time.  They  expected  the  re- 
moval of  the  external  framework  of  life  in  a  moment, 
in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye,  and  the  immediate  institu- 
tion of  a  new  external  order  in  which  the  old  positions 
would  be  reversed.  The  Jews,  hitherto  a  subject 
people,  would  be  established  in  independence  and  power 
under  the  direct  hand  of  God.  That  was  a  common 
belief  in  those  days.  And  while  we  may  be  sure  that 
Jesus  was  not  very  much  concerned  with  the  political 
prospects  of  his  people,  we  can  easily  see  that  there 
is  much  in  his  teaching  that  may  be  made  to  give  color 
to  the  view  that  he  expected  a  great  and  swift  reversal 
of  the  normal  ways  of  the  world. 

But  the  chief  difficulty  in  the  way  of  this  view  is 
the  virtual  impossibility  of  reconciling  Jesus'  em- 
phasis upon  the  inwardness  of  the  kingdom  with  the 
identification  of  the  kingdom  with  an  external  world- 
order.     While  the  current  expectation  of  the  coming 

133 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

of  the  kingdom  was  as  of  a  very  spectacular  affair, 
Jesus  categorically  declares  that  the  kingdom  cometh 
not  with  observation, — that  is,  you  cannot  see  it  com- 
ing. It  is  indeed  true  that  some  late  utterances  are 
attributed  to  Jesus  which  seem  to  contradict  this 
latter  saying.  And  we  have  either  to  assume  that 
Jesus  changed  his  mind  entirely  about  the  coming  of 
the  kingdom  in  the  last  week  of  his  life,  or  to  believe 
that  some  utterances  which  are  ascribed  to  him  did  not 
fall  from  his  lips,  at  least  in  the  form  in  which  we 
have  them.  Then  we  have  to  make  up  our  minds  if  we 
accept  both  as  authentic  words  of  Jesus,  which  of  them 
represented  his  real  mind. 

In  what  are  called  the  "eschatologlcal"  passages 
in  the  teaching  of  Jesus,  the  end  of  the  world  is  asso- 
ciated with  the  return  of  the  Son  of  Man  in  power 
and  great  glory.  And  as  this  subject  has  latterly  been 
widely  canvassed  it  might  be  as  well  to  examine  it  with 
a  little  care. 

The  term  "eschatological"  describes  a  teaching  about 
the  last  things,  about  the  end.  There  is  another  word 
used  in  these  discussions  which  describes  a  view  of 
how  the  end  will  come.  That  is  the  word  "apocalyp- 
tic." Now  apocalyptic  comes  from  a  Greek  verb 
which  signifies  to  unveil,  and  it  refers  specially  to  the 
unveiling  of  future  events.  But  it  is  used  more  nar- 
rowly with  reference  to  the  end  of  the  age  or  of  the 
world.     The  Jews  have  been  the  greatest  exponents 

134 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

of  apocalyptic*  But  its  springs  are  in  universal  human 
nature  and  it  always  makes  its  appearance  in  times 
of  distress.  It  originates  in  the  inveterate  hopefulness 
of  the  human  spirit,  and  generally  it  is  the  answer  of 
faith  to  political  pessimism.  Not  a  very  convincing  an- 
swer perhaps,  yet  embodying  a  very  real  faith  in  the 
friendliness  of  God  in  the  teeth  of  all  appearances. 
When  the  heavens  are  as  brass,  when  oppression  is  bit- 
ter and  unyielding,  and  there  is  no  relief  in  sight,  then 
hope  skips  a  generation  or  two  and  faith  thinks  that 
it  can  see  beyond  the  darkness  of  the  present  the  light 
of  a  great  deliverance  and  the  promise  of  happier 
things.  It  was  inevitable  that  a  stage  should  come 
in  the  course  of  the  European  war  when  the  apocalyp- 
tic temper  would  reappear  once  more,  as  we  know 
it  did. 

The  Jewish  prophets  as  a  rule  expected  the  deliver- 
ance of  their  people  to  come  through  the  normal 
processes  of  history.  They  were  in  no  sense  apoca- 
lyptic. They  were  content  to  wait  for  God's  mills 
to  grind  out  slowly  the  issues  of  human  affairs.  But 
the  long-drawn-out  period  of  alien  domination,  the 
distress  which  went  with  it,  the  frustrated  throws  for 
freedom,  and  the  deepening  sense  of  utter  political 
impotency  induced  in  the  Jewish  mind  a  despair  to 
which  the  slow  processes  of  history  promised  .no 
relief.  But  hope  would  not  die.  And  since  there  was 
no   Hght  on  the  plane   of   historical  happening,   men 

*  Probably  having  first  learned  it  from  the  Persians. 

135 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

began  to  look  beyond  history  to  the  immediate  inter- 
ference of  the  hand  of  God.  So  in  the  period  between 
the  two  Testaments  the  apocalyptic  hope  shaped  itself 
definitely  as  an  expectation  of  a  deliverance  from 
above,  a  sudden  close  of  the  current  dispensation  in 
a  colossal  setting  of  sign  and  portent  and  political 
convulsion.  And  with  all  this  the  inauguration  of 
a  new  order  in  which  the  chosen  people  would  at  last* 
come  into  their  kingdom.  At  the  time  of  Jesus'  birth 
as  for  a  century  before,  this  had  doubtless  been  the 
habitual  idiom  of  many  Jews.  Certainly  the  apoca- 
lyptic hope  created  a  considerable  body  of  literature 
and  it  was  the  most  conspicuous  element  in  the  popu- 
lar religion.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  Jesus  was 
perfectly  familiar  with  it,  and  it  would  be  unreason- 
able to  suppose  that  he  remained  unaffected  by  it.  But 
I  have  no  doubt  that  he  was  himself  wholly  emanci- 
pated from  it,  certainly  in  its  popular  form.  Nor 
can  I  understand  anyone  reaching  any  other  conclu- 
sion from  the  study  of  the  gospels.  Contrast  the  tone 
and  atmosphere  of  the  Parable  of  the  Prodigal  Son 
with  those  of  the  twenty-fourth  chapter  of  St. 
Luke's  Gospel.  It  is  hardly  credible  that  the  two  ut- 
terances should  have  fallen  from  the  same  lips,  and 
one  is  forced  to  suppose  that  much  of  the  latter  chapter 
has  crept  in  somehow  from  a  contemporary  source 
other  than  Jesus  or  from  a  later  source.  Moreover 
the  great  emphasis  upon  ''the  power  and  the  great 
glory"  of  the  returning  Son  of  Man  is  in  singular 

136 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

contrast  to  the  studied  lowliness  of  the  entry  into 
Jerusalem.  There  is  here  a  quite  obvious  contradiction, 
if  we  are  to  take  the  apocalyptic  language  literally. 
It  must  be  remembered,  however,  that  while  we  may 
doubt  the  authenticity  of  some  of  the  apocalyptic 
language  ascribed  to  Jesus,  there  yet  remains  a  good 
deal  which  represents  the  genuine  mind  of  Jesus.  And 
the  question  that  we  have  to  ask  is  how  we  are  to  read 
these  passages.  When  we  read  the  parables  we  do 
not  regard  them  as  stories  of  real  happenings.  We 
know  that  they  are  dramatisations  of  certain  truths. 
May  we  not  in  the  same  way  assume  that  the  apocalyp- 
tic passages  of  Jesus  are  likewise  dramatisations  of 
certain  truths  in  another  idiom?  Are  we  not  to  treat 
them  in  a  frankly  symbolical  way?  For  this  we  have 
justification  in  the  example  of  Jesus  himself.  "And 
Mt.  17:10-12  his  disciples  asked  him  saying.  Why  then 
say  the  scribes  that  Elijah  must  first  come?  And  he 
said,  Elijah  indeed  cometh  and  shall  restore  all  things ; 
but  I  say  unto  you  that  EHjah  is  come  already,  and 
they  knew  him  not  and  did  unto  him  whatsoever  they 
would."  And  speaking  of  John  Baptist,  he  said,  ''And 
Mt.  11:14  if  ye  are  willing  to  receive  it,  this  is 
EHjah  which  is  to  come."  Jesus  evidently  takes  the 
return  of  Elijah  in  no  literal  sense.  To  his  mind 
Elijah  always  comes  in  every  prophet  whom  God  sends. 
Elijah  is  a  symbol  for  the  spirit  of  prophecy.  May 
not  Jesus  intend  us  to  take  his  prediction  of  his  own 
return  in  a  similar  symbolical  sense? 

137 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

In  this  connection  it  is  significant  that  Jesus  never 
speaks  of  his  return  in  the  first  person.  It  is  the 
kingdom,  or  the  Son  of  Man  that  is  to  come.  When 
we  recall  the  clear  connection  of  these  terms  with 
Daniel's  vision,  it  is  not  inconceivable  that  Jesus  was 
using  them  to  symbolise  that  divine  order  which  is  yet 
to  be  and  which  is  the  true  predestined  order  for 
human  life.  Using  the  popular  religious  idiom  of  his 
day,  he  dramatised  in  the  picture  of  his  own  return  a 
process  which  is  inherent  and  permanent  in  human 
affairs.  May  we  not  suppose  that  in  every  human  hap- 
pening which  has  brought  the  divine  order  nearer, 
however  little,  and  however  partially,  there  has  been 
a  real  coming  of  the  Son  of  Man? 

But  this  is  not  all.  We  have  been  so  indoctrinated 
with  the  idea  of  evolution  that  Ave  suppose  that  history 
must  unfold  itself  in  a  slow  and  orderly  fashion,  tak- 
ing its  own  time  about  it.  But  the  apocalyptic  em- 
phasis brings  the  necessary  protest  against  this  view 
of  history.  It  is  not  necessary  to  wait  upon  the  slow 
movement  of  history.  We  can  hustle  history,  if  we 
will.  For  the  essence  of  apocalyptic  is,  as  Dr.  Oman 
has  finely  and  finally  said,  that  "the  divine  order  is 
always  ready  to  break  into  the  world  when  men  are 
ready  to  let  it  break  into  their  hearts." 

We  who  have  lived  through  the  great  war  do  not 
need  to  have  it  proved  to  us  that  there  is  a  "catastro- 
phic" element  in  history.  But  it  would  be  a  mistake  to 
suppose  that  because  history  has  its  catastrophic  mo- 

138 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

merits  it  is  not  evolutionary  all  the  time.  For  the 
"catastrophe,"  whether  it  be  light  or  darkness  or  both, 
is  after  all  only  the  final  convergence  of  streams  of 
influence  that  have  been  slowly  moving  and  maturing 
for  a  long  time.  And  Jesus  foresaw  both  slow  proc- 
esses of  growth  and  swift  portentous  movements  in 
the  future  course  of  the  new  order.  The  kingdom 
comes,  not  with  observations;  for  the  most  part,  you 
cannot  see  it  coming.  It  is  a  seed  growing  secretly. 
But  one  day  your  eyes  are  opened,  and  you  will  see 
it  ''in  power  and  great  glory."  But  not,  indeed,  power 
and  glory  of  the  worldly  kind.  When  the  Son  of 
Man  comes  in  his  glory,  you  need  not  be  surprised  to 
find  that  his  glory  consists  in  a  suit  of  working-man's 
overalls.  It  certainly  will  have  nothing  in  common 
with  the  trappings  of  secular  royalty  which  he  too 
often  wears  in  the  minds  of  those  who,  with  a  faith 
having  more  devotion  than  discernment,  would  per- 
suade us  that  Jesus  in  his  very  person  is  even  now 
at  the  door,  to  inaugurate,  as  they  say,  his  personal 
reign. 

When  one  speaks  of  history  as  evolutionary  one  is 
thinking  of  it  merely  as  working  out  what  is  within 
itself  whether  for  good  or  for  evil.  But  the  idea  of 
evolutipn  has  been  applied  to  human  affairs  in  a  way 
which  suggests  that  there  is  in  human  nature  a  cer- 
tain principle  of  inevitable  advance,  a  fated  growth 
from  worse  to  better  and  at  last  to  perfection.  This 
is  what  at  its  best  we  mean  when  we  speak  of  "prog- 

139 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ress."  Of  course,  some,  people  when  they  speak  of 
progress  think  of  pullman  cars  and  flying  machines; 
and  that  kind  of  thing  is  indeed  a  sort  of  progress. 
But  we  are  now  thinking  of  real  progress,  progress 
toward  perfection  in  character  and  the  realisation  of 
life.  We  cannot  discuss  so  large  a  question  here,  but 
it  belongs  to  our  purpose  to  observe  that  you  will 
search  in  vain  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus  for  anything 
that  supports  a  doctrine  of  inevitable  and  predestined 
progress.  Jesus  believed  in  human  perfectibility  but 
not  in  the  certainty  of  human  perfection.  Indeed,  there 
were  moments  when  he  looked  upon  the  human  future 
i.ukei8:8  with  misgiving.  "When  the  Son  of  Man 
Cometh,  shall  he  find  faith  upon  the  earth?"  This, 
however,  must  not  be  taken  to  mean  that  human  per- 
fection is  unattainable,  but  simply  that  it  is  not  in- 
evitable. There  is  no  irresistible  force  from  behind 
pushing  us  onward  to  the  City  of  God.  We  are  the 
masters  of  our  fate  and  we  do  not  make  progress  in 
spite  of  ourselves.  We  shall  grow  from  good  to  better 
and  on  to  perfection  if  we  will  to  have  it  so,  and  not 
otherwise. 


140 


CHAPTER  SIX 

THE  SON   OF  MAN 

(Matt.   4:1-11;   9:9-13;    11:25-30;    13:31-33;   Mark 
3  :i-i9;  Mark  8:27-31 ;  Mark  15:1-41) 


''Is  not  this  the  carpente/s  son?  Is  not  his  mother 
called  Mary?  And  his  brethren  .  .  .  and  his  sisters, 
are  they  not  all  with  usf  Whence  then  hath  this  man 
these  things?'' 

IT  is  impossible  to  say  at  what  point  in  his  life 
Jesus  became  aware  of  his  calling.  His  realisa- 
tion of  the  task  to  which  he  was  appointed  grew 
through  a  number  of  years  and  a  series  of  experiences. 
That  he  had  some  kind  of  ''soul's  awakening"  in  his 
twelfth  year  appears  from  the  story;  and  it  is  toler- 
ably safe  to  assume  that  from  this  point  onward  to 
his  formal  entry  upon  a  public  ministry  at  the  time 
of  his  baptism,  his  sense  of  a  divine  mission  grew  in 
intensity  and  clearness  until  it  became  an  unwavering 
certainty.  He  took  the  religious  revival  which  had 
been  quickened  by  his  kinsman  John  as  the  signal  for 

141 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

his  own  appearance,  and  when  he  emerges  into  pub- 
Hcity,  he  is  aUogether  sure  of  himself  and  of  his 
commission. 

The  Gospel  records  are  much  too  scanty  to  enable 
us  to  trace  with  any  assurance  the  development  of 
Jesus'  thought  and  feeling  about  himself.  Was  he 
aware  of  himself  as  ''the  Christ  of  God"  at  the  time  of 
his  baptism,  or  did  it  become  clear  to  him  at  the  time 
of  Peter's  confession?  The  question  cannot  be  an- 
swered and  need  not  be  argued.  The  one  thing  that  we 
may  be  sure  of  is  that,  however  he  may  have  inter- 
preted himself,  he  was  altogether  sure  of  himself  from 
the  very  beginning  of  his  ministry;  and  his  self-assur- 
ance seems  never  to  have  deserted  him, — unless  one 
is  to  interpret  the  Agony  in  Gethsemane  and  the  Cry 
of  Dereliction  as  symptoms  of  self -doubting.  Other- 
wise he  was  never  unsure  of  himself.  There  were 
other  things  about  which  he  was  not  so  sure  and  about 
which  he  changed  his  mind.  But  he  never  lost  con- 
fidence in  himself — until  perhaps  (as  has  been  said)  in 
the  last  tense  and  heart-breaking  hours  of  his  life. 

He  spoke,  according  to  those  who  heard  him,  "as 
Mt.7:29  one  having  authority."     The  scribes  ap- 

pealed to  authority  outside  themselves,  but  Jesus  had 
his  authority  in  himself.  The  prophets  began  their 
preaching  with  the  formula:  "Thus  saith  the  Lord," 
but  Jesus  said:  'T  say  unto  you."  With  the  phenome- 
non of  egoism  we  are  familiar  enough;  and  we  know 
it  when  we  see  it.    We  know,  moreover,  that  it  is  not 

142 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  same  thing  as  this  self-assurance  of  Jesus.  We 
detect  a  man's  egoism  in  his  tone  of  voice,  in  his  ges- 
ture, by  a  score  of  self -betraying  signs.  We  suspect 
that  the  man's  excess  of  emphasis  upon  himself  is  at 
bottom  a  mere  affectation  of  authority  and  power.  He 
is  never  quite  so  sure  of  himself  as  he  sounds.  But 
when  Jesus  says  '1"  or  "Me,"  it  is  in  a  simple,  spon- 
taneous, unaffected  way.  There  is  no  assumption  of 
an  authority  which  cannot  make  itself  good,  no  self- 
esteem,  no  gesture  of  pity  for  meaner  minds,  no  desire 
to  dominate, — none  of  the  symptoms  of  a  vulgar  ego- 
ism. Yet  there  is  no  hesitation  in  the  use  of  the  first 
Mt  11-28  personal  pronoun:  "Come  unto  me,  .  .  . 
Mt.  17:17  and  I  will  give  you  rest."  "Bring  him 
hither  to  me."  It  is  all  perfectly  natural,  unpretentious, 
and  uncalculated.  There  is  a  spontaneity  and  a  sim- 
plicity about  it  which  makes  it  a  thing  by  itself.  No 
other  man  could  speak  about  himself  in  quite  this  way 
and  Jesus  is  perhaps  the  only  person  who  could  say 
Mt.  11:29  of  himself,  "I  am  meek  and  lowly  of 
heart,"  without  showing  in  his  face  that  he  was  telling 
a  lie.  If  we  ever  heard  any  other  man  say  it,  we 
should  at  once  think  of  Uriah  Heep. 

Only  once,  so  far  as  we  know,  did  Jesus  depart  from 
this  simple  unstudied  habit  of  speech  and  bearing. 
Mt.  21:1-11  That  was  the  occasion  of  the  Entry  into 
Jerusalem,  when  Jesus,  having  spoken  many  parables, 
acted  a  parable  in  which  he  was  the  leading  figure. 
But  he  assumed  that  unusual  role  in  order  to  dramatise 

143 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

and  make  graphic  that  doctrine  of  sovereignty  which 
his  people  so  persistently  repudiated — the  sovereignty 
of  force  being  then,  as  it  is  still,  the  only  kind  that 
people  believed  in.  He  actualised  the  terms  of  an 
old  vision — the  king  riding  upon  an  ass — in  order  to 
preach  the  kingliness  of  loveliness  and  the  royalty  of 
service. 

Yet  note  that  he  assumes  for  himself  the  character 
of  a  king.  But  kingliness  was  a  wholly  new  thing 
Luke  22:25-26  upon  his  shouldcrs.  "The  kings  of  the 
Gentiles  have  lordship  over  them  .  .  .  But  ye  shall 
not  be  so:  but  he  that  is  the  greater  among  you,  let 
him  become  as  the  younger,  and  he  that  is  chief,  as 
he  that  doth  serve."  He  was  turning  the  old  con- 
ventions upside  down.  But  there  is  no  doubt  that 
there  was  something  symbolical  in  his  whole  habit  of 
regarding  himself.  In  much  of  his  speech  concerning 
himself  there  is  a  strangely  impersonal  quality.  He 
called  himself  the  "Son  of  Man" ;  and  whatever  may 
have  been  the  origins  of  the  name,  and  whatever 
eschatological  associations  the  name  may  have  had, 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  in  Jesus'  use  of  it,  it  stood 
for  the  typical,  essential,  representative  man,  the  em- 
bodiment of  essential  manhood.  "The  sabbath  was 
Mark  2:27-28  made  fof  man,  and  not  man  for  the  sab- 
bath. Therefore  the  Son  of  Man  is  lord  even  of  the 
sabbath."  The  Son  of  Man  is  not  a  man  so  much  as 
he  is  all  men. 

Now  this  is  a  very  singular  claim  to  make.  How 
144 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Jesus  reached  this  point  of  self -identification  is  some- 
thing that  the  gospels  do  not  explain  or  afford  the 
materials  for  explaining.  It  is  to  be  observed  further 
that  as  Son  of  Man  he  claims  a  prerogative  which 
had  hitherto  been  ascribed  to  God  alone.  *'The  Son 
Act.  9:6  of  Man  hath  power  to  forgive  sins.'*     He 

took  it  upon  himself  to  say :  "Thy  sins  are  forgiven." 
Of  course  if  we  go  outside  the  gospels  the  easy  ex- 
planation of  this  is  that  Jesus,  being  the  Incarnation 
of  God,  was  entitled  to  remit  sins;  but  this  does  not 
touch  the  fact  that  it  was  as  Son  of  Man  that  he 
claimed  the  power  to  forgive  sins.  But  we  are  now 
raising  difficult  questions  which  are  not  germane  to 
our  immediate  purpose.  We  are  not  immediately  con- 
cerned with  the  theological  interpretation  of  Jesus  but 
with  what  he  appeared  to  be  to  himself  in  the  gospels. 
The  upshot  of  all  this  is  that  Jesus  as  a  man  makes 
certain  claims  which  we  could  not  hear  another  man 
make  without  thinking  him  either  a  madman  or  a 
charlatan;  but  the  fact  that  we  still  take  Jesus  seri- 
ously after  so  long  a  time  shows  that  there  was  no 
incongruity  between  himself  and  his  claims.  But  this 
brings  us  face  to  face  with  the  paradox  that  Jesus 
as  a  man  makes  claims  which  seem  to  put  him  in  a 
class  apart  from  the  ordinary  man.  It  does  not  help 
us  to  say  that  the  difference  is  that  between  the  morally 
perfect  and  the  imperfect.  This  is  not  a  question  of 
character.  What  man  is  there  who  could  (for  in- 
Mt.  18:20         stance)   say  as  Jesus  said:     *'Where  two 

145 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

or  three  are  gathered  together  in  my  name,  there 
am  I  in  the  midst  of  them"  ?  What  we  have  here  is 
not  a  sense  of  moral  perfection  but  a  unique  quaUty 
of  self-consciousness,  a  peculiar  sense  of  self-hood, 
of  personality.  It  is  in  this  connection  not  irrelevant 
to  point  out  that  Jesus  does  not  appear  to  have  ever 
prayed  with  his  disciples.  The  only  time  he  ever 
said  "Our  Father"  was  when  he  was  teaching  his 
disciples  to  say  it.  For  the  rest  it  was  always  "My 
Father"  and  "Your  Father."  The  gospel  account  cer- 
tainly leaves  upon  us  an  impression  that  Jesus  stood 
in  a  unique  relation  to  life,  to  the  universe,  to  God. 
The  nature  of  that  relation  is  a  matter  we  shall  leave 
to  theologians  to  expound,  asking  of  them  only  that 
they  shall  offer  us  no  explanation  which  leaves  us  a 
Jesus  with  a  compromised  manhood.*  For  after  all, 
Mt.  11:19  "the  Son  of  Man  came  eating  and  drink- 
ing ...  a  friend  of  publicans  and  sinners." 

*  Jesus  himself  does  not  give  us  any  light  upon  this  relation, 
nor  does  he  say  whether  it  is  a  relation  which  other  men  can 
ever  attain  to.  But  the  New  Testament  writers  have  appar- 
ently their  own  view  upon  the  matter.  St.  Paul  looks  to  a 
Bom.  8'29     ^^^^   when   "the   only  begotten   son   of   God"   shall 

be  "the  first-born  among  many  brethren," — primus 
inter  pares.  The  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  puts  upon  the  lips 
Rev    3-21      °^   Jesus  the  words,   "He   that   overcometh,   I   will 

give  to  him  to  sit  down  with  me  in  my  throne,  as 
I  also  overcame  and  sat  down  with  my  Father  in  his  throne." 
And  in  that  great  interpretation  of  the  heart  of  Jesus,  the  sev- 
enteenth chapter  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  we  have  the  prayer 
John  17 '22-23  "that  they  all  may  be  one,  I  in  them  and  Thou 
in  me."  This  matter  also  is  for  the  theologian. 
Theology  has  yet  to  make  up  its  mind  about  the  problem  of 
personality — in  man  and  in  God. 

146 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

It  is  not  clear  from  the  gospels,  as  is  frequently 
assumed,  that  Jesus  identified  himself  with  the  ex- 
pected Messiah.  Peter's  description  of  him  as  "the 
Christ  of  God"  and  Jesus'  consent  to  the  description 
does  not  necessarily  imply  that  he  claimed  the  Mes- 
siahship.  The  word  Christ  may  at  first  have  been  no 
more  than  a  translation  of  an  Aramaic  word  meaning 
"anointed" ;  and  may  have  signified  simply  that  Jesus 
was  invested  with  a  special  divine  commission.  It 
is  to  be  noticed  in  this  connection  that  he  warned  his 
Bttt.  16:20  disciples  that  "they  should  tell  no  man 
that  he  was  the  Christ."  In  any  event,  his  use  of  the 
title  is  marked  by  the  same  detachment  as  we  have 
observed  in  his  use  of  the  term  "Son  of  Man";  and 
his  unwillingness  to  be  known  as  the  Messiah  is  easily 
explained  by  the  incongruity  between  his  conception 
of  his  own  work  in  the  world  and  the  current  popular 
idea  of  what  the  Messiah  was  coming  to  do. 


''The  Son  of  Man  is  come  to  seek  and  to  save  that 
which  was  lost" 

What  Jesus  conceived  his  mission  to  be  we  have  al- 
ready seen.  He  had  been  called  to  establish  a  new 
order  of  life  in  the  world,  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
But  it  would  be  a  misapprehension  to  suppose  that  he 
had  come  to  "start  a  movement,"  as  we  say.    He  cer- 

147 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

tainly  was  altogether  innocent  of  any  knowledge  of 
the  technique  of  starting  a  movement,  if  he  had  any- 
thing of  the  sort  in  his  mind.  He  had  no  organisa- 
tion save  a  loosely-bound  following  with  a  small  inner 
circle  of  disciples  whom  he  was  training  for  a  special 
task.  He  had  no  office,  no  organs  of  publicity,  no 
endorsing  lists  of  high-sounding  names — and  they 
knew  the  value  of  that  kind  of  thing  in  those  days 
as  well  as  we  do  to-day.  It  would  be  truer  to  say 
that  Jesus  was  starting  a  ferment  rather  than  a  move- 
ment. His  business  was  to  set  afoot  a  contagion  of 
life.  And  while  he  could  not  escape  a  good  deal  of 
publicity — ''He  could  not  be  hid" — and  did  arouse  a 
great  amount  of  popular  excitement  whenever  he  ap- 
peared, it  came  unsought,  and  as  a  rule  Jesus  seems 
to  have  felt  it  an  embarrassment.  He  was  afraid  of 
Mark  1:45  what  wc  should  Call  ''the  psychology  of 
the  crowd,"  and  while  there  were  times  when  he  could 
not  avoid  it,  he  was  far  from  exploiting  it  as  the 
modern  revivalist  method  does.  Jesus  trusted  to  the 
self -propagating  virtue  of  the  new  life.  The  man  in 
whom  it  was  kindled  could  be  trusted  to  kindle  it  in 
others. 

This  does  not  mean  that  Jesus  did  not  believe  in 
propaganda.*  He  did  indeed  believe  in  it  very  pro- 
foundly, and  was  actively  engaged  in  it  most  of  the 

*  It  is  a  pity  that  this  word  "propaganda"  should  tend  to  be 
used  exclusively  for  the  official  dissemination  of  half-truths  and 
lies  by  governments. 

148 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

time.  Moreover,  he  sent  out  his  disciples  on  missions 
of  propaganda  on  two  occasions.  This  was  what  he 
Mark  4:14  Called  "sowing  the  seed."  But  it  was  a 
propaganda  of  life  rather  than  of  ideas.  And  for 
this,  preaching  was  of  less  value  than  personal  con- 
tact. A  friend  of  mine — a  minister  of  many  years 
standing — said  not  long  ago  in  my  hearing:  "If  I 
had  my  ministry  over  again,  I  would  spend  three 
quarters  of  the  time  I  have  spent  in  making  sermons 
in  making  friends."  Allow  for  the  natural  over-em- 
phasis of  the  epigram,  and  you  have  here  essentially 
a  true  principle,  the  principle  of  Jesus.  He  took 
every  opportunity  of  making  a  friend,  and  to  make 
a  friend  was  to  make  a  convert  to  the  kingdom. 
While  this  personal  and  immediate  ministry  of  Jesus 
was  not  the  only  method  which  he  adopted,  it  is  well 
to  remember  that  it  was  the  foundation  of  everything 
else  and  he  never  desisted  from  it  throughout  his  pub- 
lic life.  It  had  first  claim  upon  him.  When  Matthew 
was  resigning  from  his  office  as  tax-collector,  he  gave 
a  farewell  feast  to  his  former  colleagues  and  asso- 
ciates. They  made  a  very  dubious  party,  but  Jesus 
accepted  Matthew's  invitation  without  hesitation, — to 
Mt.  9:10-11  the  great  scandal  of  the  Pharisees,  who 
thought  it  bad  form  and  bad  religion  to  be  mixed  up 
with  that  sort  of  person.  Our  trouble  to-day  is  not 
that  we  should  think  it  bad  form,  but  that  most  of 
us  would  be  too  busy  with  the  church  organisation  to 
have  any  time  for  mixing  with  outsiders  of  that  par- 

149 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ticular  type.  The  card-indexes  must  be  kept  in  order, 
the  plans  for  the  fall  have  to  be  attended  to,  the  ma- 
chine has  to  be  overhauled  and  kept  well  oiled.  And 
of  course,  if  one  is  at  the  head  of  a  great  religious 
organisation,  one  has  a  vast  business  correspondence 
to  see  to,  office  details  to  look  after,  and  committees — 
scores  of  them — to  attend  that  keep  us  too  busy  to 
dine  with  publicans  and  sinners.  But  with  Jesus,  the 
ituco  19:10  publicans  and  sinners  came  first.  *'I  came 
to  seek  and  to  save  the  lost,"  and  he  went  straight 
to  the  point.  No  considerations  of  propriety  or 
thought  of  what  others  would  say  interfered  with  his 
approach  to  this  person  or  that,  if  the  road  was  in 
any  wise  open.  It  was  folk  that  mattered  to  him; 
and  he  had  time  and  leisure  for  all  the  folk  who  came 
and  went.  He  did  not  have  to  hurry  off  to  keep  an- 
other appointment  in  the  middle  of  an  interview.  His 
primary  method  was  that  of  friendship  and  fellow- 
ship, and  when  he  told  his  disciples  that  they  were  ''the 
Mt.5;i3  salt  of  the  earth,"  he  was  suggesting  to 

them  that  they  had  to  keep  close  to  people  if  their 
antiseptic  virtue  was  to  keep  life  sweet  and  clean. 
And  what  Jesus  gave  to  the  people  was  himself,  the 
iuie8:46  vcry  stuff  of  his  life.  "I  perceived  that 
power  had  gone  forth  from  me,"  he  said  one  day 
after  a  sick  woman  had  touched  him;  and  virtue  was 
going  out  of  him  all  the  time,  now  to  a  publican  of 
notorious  and  unpleasant  reputation,  now  to  a  woman 
of  doubtful  past,  again  to  a  perplexed  "ruler  of  the 

150 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Jews."  He  had  something  to  give  and  he  never  with- 
held it.  At  its  best,  fellowship,  friendship, — ^what  is 
it  but  a  hidden  commerce,  a  mystic  market-place  where 
we  barter  life  for  life  in  a  communion  of  love,  wherein 
we  become  part  of  each  other?  And  this  it  was  in 
Jesus,  only  the  bargain  was  overwhelmingly  on  the 
other  side,  for  they  had  little  to  give,  while  he  gave 
everything,  even  life  itself. 

And  so  he  went  about  among  men,  touching  this 
man  and  that  into  life.  But  he  did  this  not  because 
his  thought  excluded  every  method  of  working  but  a 
purely  private  and  personal  ministry.  On  the  con- 
trary, he  looked  for  a  new  order  of  life,  a  kingdom. 
He  saw  a  vision  not  of  a  scattering  of  quickened  in- 
dividuals, but  of  a  society  of  re-made  men  living  to- 
gether. And  it  was  because  his  view  of  his  mission 
contained  this  larger  hope  that  his  threefold  tempta- 
tion at  the  beginning  of  his  ministry  caused  him  so 
great  heart-searching.  He  knew  that  a  public  min- 
istry lay  ahead  of  him,  that  he  had  to  assume  a  task 
of  public  leadership;  his  light  had  to  be  placed  in  a 
candlestick.  And  the  inwardness  of  these  temptations 
lay  precisely  in  the  speciousness  of  the  methods  that 
they  proposed  to  him  for  his  public  work. 

The  temptations  contained  three  separate  sugges- 
tions. The  first  was  that  he  should  become  a  uni- 
versal provider  of  bread  to  the  multitude.  Feed  the 
crowd  and  it  will  follow  you.  It  was  plainly  a  tempta- 
tion to  use  bribery,  in  order  to  gather  a  following. 

151 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

After  all,  it  was  a  good  thing  to  feed  the  people — 
for  they  were  always  underfed;  and  having  won  them 
by  charity,  why  then,  they  would  receive  the  word. 
This  is  a  common  enough  artifice,  popular  among 
politicians  who  are  avid  of  power,  though  they  hand 
out  less  bread  than  they  do  fragile  piecrust  of  prom- 
ises. But  even  churches  have  been  known  to  do  some- 
thing very  like  it.  The  doles  of  charity  which  have 
been  intended  to  recommend  religion  to  the  needy  may 
be  genuinely  well-meaning;  but  they  have  had  another 
effect  than  was  hoped  for.  Jesus  saw  that  there  would 
be  no  reality  in  a  spiritual  ministry  which  made  its 
first  appeal  to  people's  stomachs. 

The  second  temptation  was  that  he  should  play  a 
spectacular  part  and  establish  himself  as  a  prodigy. 
The  crowd  is  usually  as  curious  as  it  is  hungry,  and 
Jesus  could  have  gathered  a  large  following  by  gain- 
ing a  reputation  as  a  wonder-worker.  It  was  the 
temptation  to  a  policy  of  sensationalism.  We  can  see 
how  deeply  the  fear  of  anything  of  this  kind  had  en- 
tered into  the  soul  of  Jesus  from  his  reluctance  to 
allow  the  reports  of  his  healings  to  get  abroad.  For 
it  would  divert  men's  attentions  from  what  he  was 
chiefly  eager  to  pass  on  to  them.  He  saw  that  the 
policy  suggested  in  the  temptation  would  compromise 
his  ministry  from  the  very  start.  He  knew  that  his 
message  would  never  get  past  his  reputation;  and  a 
reputation  for  sensationalism  is  probably  the  most  diffi- 
cult thing  in  the  world  to  live  down.     This  is  surely 

152 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

a  severe  commentary  upon  many  of  the  methods  that 
churches  and  churchmen  have  used  in  recent  years  to 
further  the  Gospel.  There  is  nothing  in  the  program 
of  Jesus  that  is  helped  by  noise  and  display,  and  it 
is  the  one  thing  on  earth  of  which  it  can  be  said  with 
entire  assurance  that  it  cannot  be  ''promoted." 

The  third  temptation  was  a  temptation  to  com- 
promise, to  come  to  terms  with  evil,  to  accept  the 
second  best  in  lieu  of  the  best,  to  take  the  line  of  least 
resistance.  But  to  have  accepted  any  compromise 
would  have  been  at  once  deadly.  For  it  would  have 
betrayed  a  lack  of  confidence  in  the  inherent  power 
of  the  message  to  win  through.  He  might  by  toning 
down  the  message  to  the  taste  of  his  hearers  have 
gathered  a  great  following,  and  there  might  be  some 
sort  of  private  satisfaction  in  that.  But  Jesus'  real- 
ism never  forsook  him.  He  saw  that  any  compromise 
would  from  the  nature  of  the  case  cut  the  nerve  of  his 
hope  and  his  mission;  and  that  a  great  popular  fol- 
lowing is  not  the  same  thing  as  the  Kingdom  of  God. 

It  was  the  voice  of  worldly  wisdom  that  spoke  in 
these  temptations.  Take  the  short  cut,  it  said.  Fol- 
low the  line  of  least  resistance.  Appeal  to  the  stomachs 
of  men,  to  their  love  of  the  spectacular  and  the  sen- 
sational; suit  the  word  to  the  popular  taste.  But 
Jesus  saw  that  to  do  any  of  these  things  was  to  estab- 
lish the  new  order  on  an  illusory  and  hollow  founda- 
tion. The  first  requirement  was  moral  and  spiritual 
reality,  and  he  knew  that  he  had  to  wait  for  that, 

153 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

however  long  it  might  take.  It  might  seem  to  be  the 
longest  way  round,  but  it  was  the  only  way  to  the  goal. 
Jesus  had  no  faith  in  the  easy  by-path.  The  alternative 
was  a  long  road,  a  hard  road,  but  it  was  the  only  road 
that  did  not  belie  its  own  promise  from  the  start. 
He  would  choose  the  way  of  faith  and  quiet  rationality 
and  utter  truth,  for  there  was  no  other  way  to  the 
goal  which  he  sought.  And  so  he  would  go  among 
men,  seeking  their  soul,  their  reason,  their  conscience; 
and  if  this  meant  long  waiting,  endless  patience,  in- 
vincible endurance,  very  well,  so  be  it.  For  it  was 
the  only  way.  It  was  "the  way  of  God's  rule  in  how- 
ever few  and  the  patient  endurance  of  love  however 
long." 

So  that  was  settled  for  good  and  all.  Jesus  dis- 
missed all  the  expedients  of  worldly  wisdom  and  fol- 
lowed his  own  road.  His  task  was  to  set  afoot  a 
contagion  of  life,  and  his  way  was  to  get  into  touch 
with  men.  He  was  encumbered  with  no  nice  or  in- 
tricate questions  of  statecraft  or  public  policy.  His 
strategy  was  perfectly  simple.  The  one  thing  that 
he  had  to  do  was  to  seek  out  the  people,  this  man  and 
that  man,  and  small  companies  of  them  in  their  syna- 
gogues and  tell  them  "the  good  news";  and  let  "the 
good  news"  work  out  its  own  consequences. 


IS4 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

3 

''The  Son  of  Man  goeth  as  it  is  written  of  Mm" 

It  was  natural  that  Jesus  should  turn  to  the  villages 
and  synagogues  of  Galilee.  Jerusalem,  even  Judaea, 
was  not  promising  ground  for  a  start.  The  nearer 
one  was  to  the  Temple,  the  more  one  felt  the  embar- 
rassment and  the  pressure  of  the  past,  of  tradition, 
of  the  "dead  hand.*'  The  air  became  clearer  as  one 
drew  away  from  the  metropolis.  And  in  Galilee,  re- 
ligion was  less  "official,"  less  sophisticated,  less  hard- 
ened, than  it  was  in  the  capital.  Jesus  went  about 
the  village  synagogues  and  preached  in  them,  as  any 
laymen  might  have  done  who  felt  he  had  anything 
to  say;  and  it  is  plain  that  before  very  long  his  name 
began  to  be  noised  abroad  as  a  man  with  "a  new 
Mart  1:27-28  teaching," — and  upon  that,  Jesus'  troubles 
began.  It  led  to  the  abandonment  of  one  part  of  his 
original  plan,  and  at  last  constrained  him  to  another 
momentous  line  of  action. 

Jesus,  like  everyone  before  and  after  him  who  has 
preached  a  "new  doctrine,"  proposed  to  do  so  and  re- 
main within  the  existing  religious  institutions.  And 
it  seems  more  than  probable  that  Jesus  hoped  that  the 
new  order  of  life  would  be  ushered  in  (as  has  al- 
ready been  pointed  out)  on  the  crest  of  a  spiritual 
awakening  within  Judaism  itself.     This  accounts  for 

155 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  systematic  preaching  in  the  Galilaean  synagogues. 
And  after  all,  why  should  not  Judaism  blossom  once 
more  as  the  rose,  wilderness  though  just  then  it  might 
be?  Jesus  would  have  avowed  that  his  own  faith  went 
back  to  "Moses  and  the  prophets,"  and  that  there  was 
nothing  alien  to  the  prophetic  religion  in  his  message. 
Rather  was  it  the  fulfilment  of  what  the  prophets  had 
spoken,  the  unrealised  logic  of  their  faith.  It  was 
the  natural  place  for  Jesus  to  begin,  and  he  had  good 
ground  for  his  hope  that  Judaism  might  flower  forth 
into  new  life.  There  is,  indeed,  no  knowing  what 
might  have  happened  if  there  had  been  no  interference 
from  without.  But  no  sooner  did  the  Temple  authori- 
ties hear  of  this  innovator  in  the  north  than  they  dis- 
patched a  number  of  their  secret  service  men,  agents- 
provocateurs,  and  the  like  to  watch  him  and  to  report. 
They  also  sent  some  of  their  pundits  to  ^'heckle"  him 
and  to  dispute  with  him.  It  was  not  difficult  to  dis- 
cover subjects  of  controversy;  and  indeed  one  subject 
alone  proved  so  fruitful  in  occasions  of  debate  that 
no  other  was  needed.  That  of  course  was  the  subject 
of  sabbath  observance. 

We  need  not  go  over  the  story  of  the  controversy, 
Mark  3:1-6  savc  Only  to  recall  that  it  came  to  a  climax 
with  the  healing  of  the  man  with  the  withered  hand 
on  the  sabbath  day  in  the  synagogue.  That  day,  as 
we  have  seen,  Jesus  left  the  synagogue, — and  except 
on  one  doubtful  occasion  did  not  thereafter  enter  the 

156 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

synagogue  at  all.*  It  was  the  end  of  his  hope  of  a 
religious  efflorescence  within  Judaism.  The  wine-skin 
had  grown  too  old  and  brittle.  The  fire  could  not 
be  rekindled  upon  the  old  hearthstone.  The  syna- 
gogue had  proved  a  blind  alley. 

In  the  midst  of  the  domestic  confusion  of  France 
in  the  twenties  of  the  last  century,  Lamennais,  look- 
ing out  upon  it  with  the  eye  of  a  prophet,  wrote  about 
it:  "It  is  necessary  to  lay  in  advance  the  founda- 
tions of  a  new  society  .  .  .  the  old  is  rotten,  it  is 
dead  and  cannot  be  revived  again.  .  .  .  Our  work 
lies  in  the  creation  of  peoples."  This  might  well  serve 
as  a  description  of  Jesus'  feeling  after  the  breach  with 
the  synagogue.  It  is  very  significant  that  almost  im- 
mediately after,  we  find  him  selecting  a  small  com- 
pany from  among  his  followers  and  attaching  them 
Marfc  3:13-19  to  his  pcrsou,  ''that  they  might  be  with 
him."  He  saw  that  his  work  lay  in  the  creation  of  a 
people,  and  of  this  people  the  twelve  were  the  nucleus. 
He  was  ''laying  in  advance  the  foundations  of  a  new 
society."  And  we  are  reminded  how,  many  years 
after,  when  the  disciples  of  Jesus  had  greatly  multi- 
plied, they  were  described  as  "a  new  race."  The  selec- 
tion of  the  twelve  was  the  first  step  in  the  creation 
of  the  new  society  in  and  through  which  the  new  life 
was  to  function. 


*  Matthew  and  Mark  record  a  visit  to  the  synagogue  in  Naza- 
reth after  this  incident;  but  in  Luke's  account  this  visit  appears 
to  have  been  paid  before  this  time. 

^57 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Shortly  after,  Jesus  spent  some  months  in  retire- 
ment with  the  twelve.  During  this  time,  largely  spent 
outside  the  confines  of  Palestine,  the  twelve  were 
trained  for  the  great  office  that  Jesus  had  in  mind 
for  them.  But  the  greater  part  of  the  training  was 
the  fellowship  with  Jesus ;  and  the  sign  of  their  gradu- 
ation was  the  fact  that  they  had  acquired  the  spiritual 
insight  which  was  able  to  identify  him.  When  Peter 
Mark  8:27-30  Said  that  he  was  ''the  Christ  of  God,"  Jesus 
knew  that  their  eyes  had  been  opened.  They  had  fol- 
lowed him  first  as  a  man  eager  for  light  might  follow 
a  teacher.  But  they  found  in  the  teacher  a  messenger 
of  God  whose  business  was  to  do  rather  than  to  teach, 
whose  task  lay  not  in  a  round  of  local  preaching  or  in 
the  establishment  of  a  new  sect,  but  in  some  large 
way  on  the  plane  of  the  public  life  of  the  nation.  All 
this  was  very  vague  and  dim  in  their  minds,  no  doubt; 
but  it  was  clear  enough  to  prepare  them  for  the  next 
stage  of  the  ministry  of  their  master. 

At  this  point  comes  another  significant  circumstance. 
Mark 8:31  *'He  began  to  teach  them  that  the  Son  of 
Man  must  suffer  many  things  and  be  rejected  by  the 
elders  and  the  chief  priests  and  the  scribes,  and  be 
killed."  The  period  spent  in  retirement  was  not  spent 
entirely  in  the  education  of  the  twelve.  During  that 
time,  Jesus  had  his  own  personal  problem  to  think 
about.  His  personal  and  private  ministry  he  could 
carry  on  as  the  occasion  offered;  and  occasions  did 
not  fail.     But  his  public  ministry  in  the  synagogues 

158 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

had  been  frustrated.  And  in  the  interval  between  the 
incident  in  the  synagogue  and  his  retirement  into 
Syrophoenicia,  and  during  one  or  two  brief  excursions 
subsequently  into  Galilee,  it  became  perfectly  clear 
that  the  tireless  attentions  of  the  Pharisees  and  their 
intrigues  with  the  Herodians  would  make  quite  im- 
possible a  preaching  ministry  in  the  country  at  large. 
What  then  was  he  to  do?  Was  he  to  be  content  with 
a  purely  private  and  (as  it  were)  underground  propa- 
ganda? There  was  too  much  at  stake  to  allow  Jesus 
to  be  satisfied  with  this  solution,  for  he  was  not  pur- 
suing an  affair  of  his  own.  His  sense  of  himself  as 
the  symbol  of  a  new  order  of  life,  the  organ  of  the 
kingdom  of  God,  called  for  action  more  positive  and 
drastic  than  a  subterranean  diffusion  of  "the  good 
news.''  Moreover,  the  obstruction  which  had  been  put 
in  his  way  and  which  hindered  the  kingdom  was  a 
public  affair,  a  circumstance  to  be  met  publicly,  and 
as  Jesus  clearly  saw,  to  be  met  in  its  stronghold.  It 
Mt.  16:21  grew  on  him  that  he  "must  go  up  to  Jeru- 
salem." For  in  Jerusalem  was  focussed  the  strength 
of  this  sinister  thing  that  thwarted  him.  It  was  the 
home  of  Anti-Christ.  And  he,  the  Christ,  the  Son 
of  Man,  was  under  necessity  to  go  up  to  Jerusalem 
to  proclaim  in  his  own  person  the  challenge  of  the 
kingdom, — there  where  were  gathered  together  all  the 
forces  that  hindered  the  kingdom.  There  were  the 
traditionalists,  the  politicians,  the  nationalists,  all  those 
who  worshipped  "this  world's  unspiritual  God."    There 

159 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

were  the  ecclesiastics,  who  suffered  the  Temple  to  be 
defiled  for  the  emoluments  it  brought  to  them,  and  who 
foresaw  their  own  undoing  in  the  spread  of  Jesus' 
influence.  There  were  also  blind  but  honest  tories 
who  were  (as  Walter  Bagehot  might  have  said)  ''cross 
with  the  agony  of  a  new  idea."  Jerusalem  was  the 
metropolis  of  reaction  and  corruption.  And  thither, 
plainly,  Jesus,  being  what  he  was,  had  to  go.  So 
Luke  9:51  "he  sct  his  face  steadfastly  to  go  to  Jeru- 
salem." 

He  went  with  his  eyes  open,  knowing  what  awaited 
him.  He  had,  indeed,  plenty  of  precedents  upon  which 
to  go  in  his  prevision  of  what  lay  before  him.  He 
had  the  experience  of  the  prophets,  and  he  cannot  have 
failed  to  recall  the  fifty-third  chapter  of  Isaiah.  For 
he  expected  to  "suffer  many  things."  But  all  other 
roads  were  blocked.  There  was  nothing  left  for  him 
to  do  but  to  show  to  his  brethren  the  nature  of  their 
moral  trouble,  the  whole  black  thing  that  w^as  wrong 
with  the  world,  by  standing  over  against  it  and  letting 
it  work  out  its  utmost  consequences  upon  his  own 
person  before  the  eyes  of  all  men.  And  so  it  came 
to  pass. 


''The  Son  of  Man  came  not  to  he  ministered  unto, 
hut  to  minister  and  to  give  his  life  a  ransom  for 
many." 

i6o 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Anatole  France  in  one  of  his  stories  describes 
Pontius  Pilate,  grown  old  and  taking  a  summer  cure 
at  a  Roman  watering  place,  and  in  a  conversation  only 
vaguely  recalling  the  trial  and  death  of  Jesus.  That 
was  the  measure  of  the  affair  to  the  official  mind,  a 
mere  incident  of  daily  politics.  And  even  now  when 
we  think  of  the  matter  with  a  little  detachment,  it 
seems  singular  that  what  on  the  face  of  it  appears  to 
be  no  more  than  the  rather  squalid  and  contemptible 
end  of  an  obscure  peasant  in  an  obscure  corner  should 
have  become  the  master- fact  of  history. 

The  truth  is  that  ''the  instinct  of  mankind"  has  al- 
ways felt  in  the  story  the  presence  of  certain  elements 
which  are  not  to  be  measured  by  the  common  foot- 
rule  of  historical  judgment.  We  seem  to  move  here 
in  the  region  of  something  like  absolute  moral  con- 
trasts, where  circumstances  of  publicity  or  obscurity, 
of  size  and  numbers,  of  time  and  place,  sink  into  com- 
parative unimportance.  The  event  is  historical;  but 
it  is  also  superhistoric.  It  moves  on  a  plane  of  time- 
lessness.  The  first  thing,  but  certainly  the  least  thing, 
that  we  say  about  the  Cross  is  that  it  happened  on 
a  certain  day  at  a  certain  place.  The  date  of  the  Cross 
is  not  a  particular  day  but  all  time;  the  site  of  the 
Cross  is  not  Jerusalem  but  the  whole  earth.  The  Cross 
is  the  moral  crisis  of  the  whole  race,  the  epitome  and 
symbol  of  its  moral  tragedy  and  of  its  hope. 

What  happened  to  Jesus  had  in  kind  happened  be- 
fore.   It  had  happened  to  Jeremiah,  it  happens  when- 

i6i 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ever  a  prophet  is  stoned  or  burnt  or  shot.  But  the 
Cross  has  its  own  uniqueness.  Moral  judgments  upon 
human  sin  in  history, — such  as  the  late  war — are  seen 
through  the  haze  of  human  imperfection,  in  a  twi- 
light of  mingled  motives  of  good  and  evil,  and  the 
innocent  suffer  with  the  guilty.  But  when  the  power 
of  human  evil  broke  upon  Jesus,  it  was  seen  in  its 
own  true  color,  darkness  against  light,  black  against 
white,  with  no  blurred  edges  and  no  twilight  zone 
.  .  .  and  the  innocent  alone  suffered.  It  is  this  which 
invests  the  Cross  with  its  superhistoric  quality.  It 
is  felt  to  be  a  revelation  of  absolute  moral  distinctions. 

The  death  of  Jesus  was  the  natural  outworking  of 
human  self-love.  In  the  death  of  the  Son  of  Man, 
symbol  at  once  of  the  kingdom  of  God  and  of  essen- 
tial humanity,  we  have  the  abiding  apocalypse  of  sin, 
the  revelation  of  its  anti-social  nature  and  conse- 
quences. The  crucifixion  of  Jesus  remains  the  supreme 
instance  and  embodiment  of  that  contempt  of  person- 
ality which  is  the  firstfruits  of  our  self-love  and  the 
undoing  of  our  human  soHdarity.  The  Cross  is  the 
whole  wide  tragedy  of  mankind  focussed  down  to  one 
point  of  utter  darkness. 

But  the  Cross  reveals  much  more  than  the  truth 
about  sin.  Above  the  confusion  of  Calvary,  through 
the  tumult  and  clamor,  a  voice  was  heard  saying: 
i^nice  23:34  "Father,  forgivc  them  for  they  know  not 
what  they  do."  Above  the  noise  of  hell  was  heard 
the  voice  of  the  everlasting  mercy,  the  last  word  of 

162 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

God  over  against  the  worst  deed  of  man.  *'The  love 
of  enemies,"  says  Dr.  P.  T.  Forsyth,  "is  love  being 
true  to  itself  through  everything."  Here  it  is — love 
without  a  limit.  There  is  a  note  of  the  ultimate  in  this 
prayer  to  which  men's  hearts  have  never  failed  to  re- 
spond, recognising  in  it  a  depth  and  a  reach  of  charity 
essentially  divine.  'Truly,"  said  the  centurion,  "this 
Mart  15:39  man  was  the  son  of  God."  The  prayer 
has  come  down  the  ages  as  the  most  godlike  word  that 
ever  fell  on  human  hearing.  For  all  the  infamy,  the 
lust,  the  blindness  that  broke  upon  the  Son  of  Man 
and  which  is  for  ever  laying  waste  this  fair  earth  of 
our  inheritance,  God  has  this  final  word  of  mercy. 
When  sin  has  done  its  worst  and  its  utmost,  mercy 
holds  the  field.  The  Cross  is  the  everlasting  mercy, 
focussed  down  to  one  glorious  word  of  life. 

It  matters  little  here  whether  we  think  of  God  as 
immanent  or  incarnate  in  Jesus ;  the  point  of  the  Cross 
is  the  same.  It  reveals  the  moral  order  of  the  world 
because  it  reveals  the  moral  nature  of  God.  Someone 
has  finely  said  that  "the  Cross  is  the  ground  plan  of 
the  universe."  It  means  that  love  is  the  principle  of 
life,  a  love  that  is  true  to  itself  to  the  end  and  is  suffi- 
cient in  itself  for  the  need  of  man.  Sin  is  rebellion; 
love  meets  it  with  reconciliation.  God  opposes  to  sin 
the  gift  of  forgiveness  freely  and  royally  given,  with- 
out money  and  without  price.  God's  revenge  is  for- 
giveness, God's  punishment  is  pardon.  This  is  the 
unbearable  retribution  of  love. 

163 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

A  noted  English  preacher  once  said  that  ''when  on 
earth  Jesus  was  never  off  the  Cross."  Certainly  the 
Cross  gathered  up  his  life  into  perfect  completeness, 
and  what  he  says  on  the  Cross  he  said  throughout  his 
life.  The  will  to  love,  the  will  to  forgive,  the  will  to 
serve,  the  will  to  give  one's  life  a  ransom  for  many, 
these  are  the  things  by  which  it  is  appointed  that  men 
shall  live;  and  not  otherwise.  It  is  these  things  that 
the  Cross  proclaims,  as  the  deepest  truth  of  the  life 
of  God  and,  by  that  token,  the  final  law  of  the  life 
of  man. 


164 


BY  WAY  OF  EPILOGUE 

THE  WINGLESS  VICTORY 

ON  the  Acropolis  at  Athens  stand  the  ruins  of  a 
beautiful  little  temple  dedicated  (so  the  story 
goes)  to  Nike  Apteros,  the  Wingless  Victory. 
The  legend  has  it  that  the  statue  of  Victory  was  chis- 
elled without  wings  in  order  to  symbolise  the  hope  and 
the  confidence  of  the  Athenians  that  victory  would 
thereafter  never  desert  their  city.  To-day  the  temple  is 
a  battle-scarred  ruin,  symbol  of  the  fickleness  of  what- 
ever gods  there  be  that  dispense  the  fortunes  of  war. 
The  victory  it  celebrated  is  an  old  forgotten  story.  But 
despite  its  scars,  its  beauty  still  remains. 

Here  is  a  parable  as  full  of  meaning  as  an  tgg  is  of 
meat.  We  speak  of  *'the  glory  that  was  Greece."  But 
what  do  we  mean  when  we  say  the  words?  We  are 
not  thinking  of  the  victories  of  Greece  or  of  its  em- 
pire, though  these  were  notable  in  their  day.  An 
incident  here  and  there  in  its  history,  the  story  of 
Thermopylae  for  instance,  still  warms  our  blood.  But 
there  is  little  in  the  external  history  of  Greece  to  dis- 
tinguish it  from  the  history  of  any  other  country.  The 
glory  of  the  Greek  lay  in  other  things.     He  was  the 

165 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

pathfinder  of  the  intellect;  for  human  thought  still 
travels  along  the  trails  that  he  blazed.  His  vision  of 
beauty  raised  life  to  a  new  plane  of  worth  and  wonder ; 
and  the  loveliness  he  created  has  become  the  price- 
less inheritance  of  the  race.  His  poets  and  dramatists 
still  speak  a  living  word,  for  they  uttered  ultimate 
things  that  never  grow  old.  The  true  Wingless  Vic- 
tory of  Athens  was  not  in  its  triumph  upon  any  field 
of  battle  or  in  the  invincibility  of  its  armies  at  any 
time,  for  all  that  passed  away;  but  in  the  expression 
of  its  inner  life  in  a  great  pioneering  search  for  truth 
and  in  enduring  works  of  beauty. 

A  few  days'  journey  from  Athens  will  bring  you  to 
another  historic  hill.  Upon  that  hill  was  raised  one  day 
not  a  temple  but  a  cross,  a  criminal's  gibbet.  On  the 
face  of  it  what  happened  that  day  seemed  to  be  little 
more  than  an  ordinary  incident  of  daily  imperial  poli- 
tics. The  civil  magistrate  had  done  his  duty  to  the 
empire;  and  if  the  case  had  been  a  little  unusual  and 
the  law  had  been  unduly  strained, — well,  you  never 
know  where  that  kind  of  thing  might  end,  and  now, 
thank  goodness,  it  was  over  and  done  with.  And 
Pilate  turned  in  his  frigid  official  way  to  the  next 
piece  of  imperial  business  that  required  attention.  The 
high  ecclesiastics  of  Jerusalem  saw  only  a  mischievous 
fanatic,  who  threatened  their  authority  and  endangered 
the  integrity  of  the  church,  put  safely  out  of  the  way. 
The  event  was  a  triumph  for  the  combined  forces  of 
church  and  state.    To  the  political  official  as  well  as  to 

i66 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

the  churchman  it  was  a  closed  incident,  a  wingless  vic- 
tory. At  least  so  it  looked  at  the  time.  We  know 
how  it  looks  to-day. 

Here,  surely,  is  something  that  can  bear  a  good 
deal  of  thinking  about.  Most  of  our  human  troubles, 
the  deepest  and  vastest  of  our  human  tragedies  spring 
at  last  from  this — that  men  have  never  seriously  sat 
down  to  think  what  is  involved  in  this  great  and  per- 
sistent historical  paradox.  It  is  the  surest  clue  to  the 
kind  of  world  that  we  live  in,  and  to  the  kind  of  people 
that  we  should  be.  The  Athenian  Victory  is  (as  I 
liave  said)  an  old  forgotten  story,  hardly  to  be  dis- 
cerned through  the  mists  of  time.  To-day  it  simply 
does  not  matter.  But  the  beauty  which  commemorated 
it  still  remains,  a  joy  for  ever.  Pilate  and  Caiaphas, 
who  wrought  so  satisfying  and  final  a  work  on  Calvary, 
are  to-day  remembered  as  a  couple  of  common  hang- 
men. Both  in  Athens  and  Jerusalem  the  tables  were 
turned.  In  Athens,  it  was  Beauty  and  not  Might  that 
won  the  wingless  victory.  In  Jerusalem  the  wingless 
victory  went  not  to  empire  or  to  organised  religion,  but 
to  the  love  which  was  incarnate  in  the  person  of  Jesus. 

Yet  it  is  the  sad  and  strange  fact  that  after  so  long  a 
time  and  in  the  teeth  of  all  his  experience,  man  has 
set  his  heart  upon  the  victory  that  deserts  him  and 
upon  the  achievement  that  perishes.  Not  yet  does  he 
understand  that  the  wingless  victory  belongs  to  the 
things  that  spring  from  his  hidden  life,  to  the  beauty 

167 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

that  he  creates,  to  the  love  that  clothes  life  with  love- 
liness. He  still  supposes  that  this  world  that  he  sees 
is  the  only  world  that  matters,  and  that  the  things  that 
count  are  those  that  can  be  counted.  If  he  does  at 
all  acknowledge  that  there  is  an  unseen  world  and 
a  part  of  life  that  is  out  of  sight,  it  is  as  a  sort  of  sen- 
timental and  romantic  fringe  that  may  be  attended  to 
when  there  is  no  more  serious  business  on  hand.  And 
the  serious  things  are  the  external  things,  wealth, 
power,  empire.  This  is  the  frame  of  mind  that  we 
sometimes  call  materialism;  we  have  lately  learnt  to 
call  it  real-politik,  when  it  turns  to  public  affairs. 
When  it  carries  out  its  own  logic,  it  frowns  on  all 
idealisms  and  enthusiasms  as  dangerous  foolishness 
which  threatens  the  state  and  interferes  with  business. 
It  tramples  underfoot  the  instances  of  religion  and  the 
scruples  of  conscience;  it  rides  rough-shod  over  all 
principles  and  sentiments  that  withstand  its  purposes. 
Its  tests  of  prosperity  are  territory,  markets,  bank-bal- 
ances, social  prestige:  and  its  law  (unavowed,  of 
course)  is  the  law  of  the  jungle.  Yet  what  history 
has  to  say  about  these  things  is  not  to  be  mistaken.  It 
tells  of  the  transitory  and  perishable  character  of  these 
material  goods.  They  bear  upon  them  the  very  image 
and  superscription  of  death.  Empires  rise,  fall  and  dis- 
appear; and 

Great  Caesar,  dead  and  turned  to  clay. 
May  stop  a  hole  to  keep  the  wind  away. 
i68 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

Institutions  flourish  and  perish,  and  moth  and  rust 
corrupt  the  treasure  that  we  so  painfully  gather. 
Civilisations  that  were  the  glory  of  their  day  and 
seemed  to  have  upon  them  the  very  sign  of  immor- 
tality have  vanished;  and  to-day  we  gather  their  for- 
gotten history  from  the  debris  and  the  sandheaps  that 
were  once  their  prosperous  cities. 

They  say  the  lion  and  the  lizard  keep 
The  courts  where  Jamshyd  gloried  and  drank  deep, 
And  Bahram,  that  great  hunter,  the  wild  ass 
Stamps  o'er  his  head  but  cannot  break  his  sleep. 

It  is  something  more  than  a  morbid  poetic  fancy 
that  sees  us  living  in  the  valley  of  the  shadow  of 
death.  But  must  the  sign  of  mortality  be  for  ever  upon 
the  handiwork  of  man?  xA^re  we  doomed  to  labor  for- 
ever in  making  things  that  are  predestined  to  decay 
and  ruin?  Is  mankind  condemned  to  an  eternity  of 
these  labors  of  Sisyphus,  building  empires  and  civilisa- 
tions only  to  pull  them  down  again?  Must  his  victo- 
ries always  have  wings? 

The  truth  about  man  is  that,  so  far,  he  has  never 
lived  more  than  a  fraction  of  his  possible  life,  and  by 
far  the  greater  part  of  human  nature  is  unexplored 
and  unrealised.  Here  and  there  along  the  centuries 
there  have  been  great  outgoings  of  light  and  fire  from 
these  hidden  depths,  evidence  of  energies  and  capaci- 

169 


THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

ties  of  which  the  ordinary  man  is  unaware.  Yet  the 
materials  are  buried  in  us  which  might  raise  the  whole 
of  life  to  dimensions  of  splendor  and  glory  that  would 
make  the  best  of  the  past  seem  but  the  flicker  of  a 
rushlight.  Some  hints  of  what  this  life  might  be  we 
can  gather  from  the  beauty  of  the  Parthenon  and  the 
temple  of  the  Wingless  Victory,  from  the  vision  of 
prophets  and  poets  who  have  descried  afar  off  the 
grandeur  of  the  human  promise.  You  may  see  it  all 
within  the  compass  of  a  single  life  in  Jesus  of  Naza- 
reth. It  is  no  idle  dream  that  sees  the  whole  level  of 
life  raised  to  the  height  of  the  high  peaks  of  the  past. 
For  the  materials  of  it  are  here,  and  God  has  not  yet 
deserted  his  world.  There  is  away  ''beyond  the  bound 
of  the  waste,"  a  city  of  God  awaiting  its  builders,  a 
city  whose  dwellers  shall  be  poets  and  prophets  and 
seers,  having  the  mind  of  Christ,  a  city  of  supermen 
and  superwomen  who  spend  their  lives  in  works  of 
love  and  beauty,  and  whose  city  reflects  the  light  of 
their  own  loveliness.  And  that  city  shall  not  be  left 
desolate,  nor  shall  time  wear  down  its  youth  or  despoil 
it  of  its  fairness.  It  is  our  task  to  build  that  city, — 
and  what  is  more,   we  can. 

But  not  one  stone  of  that  city  shall  we  lay  upon 
another  until  the  city  be  building  in  our  own  souls. 
The  Kingdom  within  alone  can  create  the  Kingdom 
without.  And  if  the  Kingdom  be  within  us,  we  can- 
not but  create  the  Kingdom  without.     It  is  the  para- 

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THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

dox  of  this  new  wine  that  it  makes  its  own  wine-skins ; 
the  new  Hfe  begets  organs  and  an  environment  that 
befit  it.  The  new  order  will  grow  spontaneously  out 
of  the  new  life. 

This  new  life  has  its  own  characteristic  ways  of 
working,  and  there  are  three  things  that  it  does  for 
us. 

First,  it  turns  upon  matter  with  a  vision  of  beauty 
and  transfigures  it  into  a  vehicle  for  that  beauty.  Wil- 
liam Blake  says  in  one  place:  "A  Poet,  a  Painter,  a 
Musician,  an  Architect,  the  man  or  woman  who  is 
not  one  of  these  is  not  a  Christian."  This  is  a  hard 
saying  for  some  of  us,  but  we  may  for  our  comfort 
remember  that  though  we  be  artists  in  desire  and  ap- 
preciation only,  we  have  good  title  to  claim  a  place  in 
Blake's  Christian  company.  But  what  he  means  by 
this  saying  is  that  Art  is  the  kingdom  of  God  ex- 
pressing itself  in  the  medium  of  material  things.  The 
beauty  of  the  Nike  Apteros  is  a  spiritual  vision  trans- 
lated into  stone;  and  so  men  may  translate  into  sound 
and  color  the  loveliness  that  is  revealed  to  the  spirit. 
This  Hfe  is  the  mother  of  a  living  art. 

Second,  this  life  gives  to  the  mind  the  key  of  truth, 
not  the  whole  truth  or  the  ultimate  truth,  but  the  way 
into  such  truth  as  a  man  needs  to  live  by.  Man  has 
been  from  the  beginning  of  days  searching  for  truth; 
but  he  has  gone  by  the  way  of  speculation  along  the 
highroad  of  logic;  and  he  has  returned  from  all  his 
searching,  bringing  back  the  question  with  which  he 

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THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

started:  What  is  truth,  and  where  is  it  to  be  found? 
But  when  the  kingdom  is  come  in  a  man,  he  has  the 
key  of  truth  in  it;  and  he  has  it  as  a  criterion  of 
knowledge  and  an  interpretation  of  Hfe.  This  man 
starts  out  where  the  philosopher  wistfully  hopes  one 
day  to  arrive ;  and  when  he  passes  on  to  men  the  truth 
that  he  sees,  it  is  not  in  the  formal  treatise  of  the 
schools,  but  in  some  flaming  prophetic  word,  or  sung 
in  a  sonnet,  or  dramatised  in  a  tale, — ^as  Jesus  passed 
on  the  truth  that  was  in  him  to  men. 

Third,  it  turns  upon  men  with  love  and  by  loving 
them  redeems  them.  In  our  blind  folly  we  have  sup- 
posed that  the  anarchy  and  waywardness  of  human 
nature  is  to  be  overcome  by  coercions  and  restraints, 
by  pains  and  penalties :  and  in  our  blindness  we  have 
but  multiplied  crime  and  misery.  God  sets  out  to 
win  us  from  our  rebellion  by  unyielding  love,  and  of 
that  love  Jesus  is  the  very  embodiment  and  incarna- 
tion. The  story  of  Jesus  is  "the  instance  of  love 
without  a  limit,"  the  love  that  will  not  let  me  go 
or  give  me  up,  that  flings  down  party-walls  and  over- 
leaps frontiers,  flings  wide  the  gate  of  friendship  to 
the  enemy;  the  impulse  and  the  energy  that  creates 
the  sovereign  loveliness,  the  loveliness  of  a  living 
society  of  men,  purged  of  enmities  and  discords  and 
hatreds,  living  out  its  manifold  and  abundant  life  in  the 
unbroken  harmony  of  unreserving  fellowship. 


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THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

"Except  a  grain  of  wheat  fall  into  the  earth  and 
John  12:24  die  it  abideth  alone :  but  if  it  die,  it  beareth 
much  fruit."  That  is  the  cost  of  life.  It  finds  itself  only 
by  losing  itself.  It  creates  beauty  only  by  pouring  itself 
out.  ''Without  the  shedding  of  blood,"  said  the 
old  word,  ''there  is  no  remission  of  sins,"  no,  nor  any- 
thing else  worth  having,  no  freedom,  no  beauty,  no  art, 
no  life.  Life  is  realised  by  pouring  itself  out  without 
stint. 

Love's  strength  standeth  in  love's  sacrifice. 

So  there  was  One  who  poured  out  his  life  in  death 
for  the  love  that  He  bare  us,  that  He  might  bring  us  to 
God  and  to  one  another.  "Every  kindness,"  says  Will- 
iam Blake,  "is  a  little  death  in  the  divine  image."  For 
all  real  kindness,  even  the  least,  is  a  self -giving,  an  out- 
going of  life.  The  Cross  is  the  abiding  symbol  of 
that  self -giving  that  the  love  which  creates  and  re- 
deems has  always  to  pay. 

But  after  the  Cross,  the  Resurrection.  And  just  as 
the  Cross  is  the  symbol  of  life  poured  forth,  so  the 
Resurrection  is  the  symbol  of  life  regained,  life  en- 
larged. It  is  the  sacrament  of  the  survival  of  the  life 
spent  in  the  creation  of  beauty,  in  the  revelation  of 
truth,  in  the  redeeming  of  men,  these  imperishable 
things  that  defy  change  and  time  and  death.  A  little 
temple  on  a  hill,  a  story  told  by  the  wayside,  a  cross 
of  wood,  here  are  the  undying,  unfading  things, 
that  survive  the  changes  and  accidents  of  time  while 

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THE  UNTRIED  DOOR 

all  other  things  are  laden  with  mortality.  For  these 
are  the  out-workings  of  the  divine  life  in  the  soul  of 
man  as  he  passes  through  a  world  of  sense.  The  Resur- 
rection is  our  assurance  that  this  life  not  only  has  im- 
mortality in  itself  but  sets  the  seal  of  immortality  upon 
all  that  it  touches,  whether  it  be  sound  or  stone,  pig- 
ment or  word,  or,  best  of  all,  a  human  soul.  It 
creates  and  redeems  for  eternity.  And  hereto,  and 
only  hereto,  to  this  life  to  which  the  Son  of  Man  calls 
us,  belongs  the  Wingless  Victory. 


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